


Carrot [Version 2.0]

by Unforgotten



Category: Dragon Ball Z (Anime)
Genre: Abandoned WIP, Gen, doppelgangers, old fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2001-04-01
Updated: 2001-04-01
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11816973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: Version two of my never-completed DBZ epic from the year of our Lord 2001, when I was 15 and decided to add all sorts of magic and fantasy stuff to a canon that was mostly five-minute battles being dragged out for 10+ episodes. Starts with a second version of Goku showing up to be raised by Vegeta, and goes on to add everything but the kitchen sink, including made-up extra names for the Saiyan characters, random Japanese everywhere (as was customary in fic at that time), original characters galore, and a plot that was certainly going somewhere even if I can no longer remember where. (I wish I could, because I would totally be down to explain that loltastically in the end notes.)





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I deleted this from ff.n eons ago and am convinced I will eventually lose it if I don't archive it somewhere. As I'm still very sad about all the fics from my first fandom (Animorphs) that are now lost to the sands of time, I just couldn't let that happen.
> 
> The original version of this fic was a lot more lulz and a lot less serious business. It's [over here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11816760/chapters/26661669). Neither version is finished.
> 
> As a reminder, this fic is **abandoned** , and has been for 16 years at the time of this posting. There is zero chance I will ever continue it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the lack of line breaks; I'm c/ping from a Word doc that didn't have them. I may or may not come back and add them in, but it's not a priority, so idk when I will have the time/energy to do that for ancient fic. There were also a LOT of italics in the original, some of which were excessive and others of which were necessary, so I may or may not bother to add those back in either.

Prologue  
Kakarotto rubbed his eyes with tiny fists, considered crying, and reconsidered when he remembered how the noise had resonated the last time he'd tried complaining in the traditional way of an infant.  
He growled in complaint instead, a sound far more Saiyajin-like than any wailing could ever be, but not nearly as satisfying as unleashing his total frustration. He dearly wanted to flail his arms and scream at the top of his lungs, with tears leaving wet trails down his cheeks.  
He missed his brother. Ra-ditz. Only his brother had ever come to the nursery and picked him up, crooned to him, then done something else, something like talking but not like talking, something soft and wonderful sounding, something Kakarotto would later come to know as singing.  
The place that Kakarotto might have eventually returned to and called home had been lost in a great cloud of red dust and a myriad of scattered rocks perhaps twelve hours before, following a great white explosion. He would not even know of the planet==s existence for many years to come, a period of time incomprehensible to any young child, let alone an infant.  
Something odd happened just then: the world around Kakarotto shuddered. When it stopped--and the stopping was the problem, the shaking being exceedingly fun and definitely more interesting than observing the red twinkle of stars behind glass--he slammed into one of the sides of his space pod. Pain quivered through his right side and into his left, leaving him gasping and wondering what that was.  
Kakarotto did something he hadn't done before: he screamed. This time, unlike his other wailing, he really did howl, and it was a howl composed of pain, terror of that pain, and instinctive anger that anything would dare to hurt him. The noise rebounded off the walls, shaking the pod viciously.  
Then he ceased crying for terror of a sudden, furious shuddering around him. He could not know why the pod shivered now, could not associate the small metal bolts popping out of their places with that which now frightened him. He could not think about this and decide that the pod shook because it was falling apart. Further, he could not reason that the pod was, in turn, falling apart because of the defects that had somehow managed to escape the notice of those whose work it was to make certain every pod would actually function well enough to carry its occupant without collapsing. Kakarotto had been assigned to Chikyuu, but that planet was very far from where Vejiitasei had once been. Though his pod could, possibly, have reached the other planet had it been even in the same system as Vejiitasei, it was not.  
Kakarotto was going to die before he ever set eyes on that sphere of blue and green, Chikyuu. Not from disease, not in battle, not standing strong for a cause--but from sheer incompetence. A hasty mistake would end the life of the one who would have been called Goku, and the entire universe would pay for that mistake.  
Would have, that is, if the gods had forgotten to take care of their own. But the gods didn't overlook such matters, would never have dared, when all that they hoped for could vanish with the death of a single infant. Kakarotto's plight had been noted long before it ever occurred, before he had even been conceived.  
Due arrangements had been made.  
Still, Kakarotto couldn't have known this, and although he didn't understand what dying was, every drop of Saiyajin blood within him, every string of being, knew he did not wish to die. So he screamed, and thrashed, and screamed once more, a different sort of pain from the one in his sides eventually coming to be inside of his head as a result. At this point, he stopped screaming and continued his objections with mere whimpers.  
This was when a twitching, brown-shaded-red tail appeared in the window, whipping about as if the owner were especially annoyed.  
It was a Saiyajin tail, and it didn't belong to Kakarotto. He was squeezing his tail hard--not too hard, just hard enough so that he could feel it, keep from screaming for its presence--with both hands, its warm, furry length giving him comfort of the sort he hadn't felt since Ra-ditz had sung to him.  
Kakarotto found this other tail very sobering at first, but once the rest of the Saiyajin drifted into view, the baby made approving sort of babbling noises, let go of his tail, and waved his arms wildly about as he was towed out of his once projectile, now wobbly course.

* * *  
What am I supposed to do with an infant? Wolvwin grumbled inwardly as he dropped the pod none-too-gently onto the metal flooring of the docking room. I don't know anything about children!  
Those who controlled his fate were not listening--or at least, were not paying proper attention, for he received no answer from above. He might have liked assistance for something like this, but of course, they wouldn't offer it. As a matter of fact, they'd hidden themselves somewhere and would no doubt stay there until he didn't need their help anymore.  
I refuse to do this! he thought even as he pressed a button and the red glass slid away from the entrance to the pod. He did, however, manage to ignore the little sounds and arm waving of the infant as he opened a small panel at the back of the pod. With a gloved hand, he held the paper he found there up and scowled at it as his eyes ran over what was written there.  
"So your name's Kakarotto, huh?" he murmured as he absently skimmed the rest of the printout. "Raditz's little brother?"  
For the first time, he looked directly at the baby. Kakarotto's hair told the tale.  
"Bardock's kid, Raditz's brother," Wolvwin decided with a nod, rubbing the hairless stub of his chin.  
There was exactly one other piece of information that Wolvwin needed. He skimmed the paragraphs a little bit faster, wondering why it took so many lines to say so little--he'd never read this sort of document before; he wasn't used to doctor's reports--and eventually found that piece of information.  
"You're headed for Chikyuu?!" he hissed, dropping the printout. He didn't pay attention as it slowly floated to the ground; instead, he stared at this Kakarotto with renewed appreciation for irony. "Chikyuu?" he repeated as though Kakarotto could not only understand but answer.  
Of all places, Chikyuu?  
Wolvwin shook his head and, all rebellious adolescence attitudes for the moment shocked out of him, reached into the pod and picked up the baby. He held Kakarotto at arm's length and tried to ignore the infant's happy cooing. When Kakarotto's tail wrapped around his wrist, it was a little bit more difficult to do so. When he began waving his arms about and babbling in incoherent infant-talk, it became impossible.

* * *  
A few months later, after he had the basic syllables down, Kakarotto decided that Wolvwin was his 'Da-dee.' At first, this irritated Wolvwin like nothing else could have; he was no one's 'Da-dee,' and certainly not the father to a third-class brat!  
However, he no longer found the child quite so annoying in that way; one got used to diminutives, and Wolvwin had had one worse than that once. He still had it, actually.  
No, now the child was walking--Saiyajin children teethed fast, walked soon, and spoke sooner--and making a nuisance of himself all over the ship. Even though it was only Wolvwin and Kakarotto on the ship, it was a rather large craft. The more room a Saiyajin child had, the more havoc said child could create; that was the point of giving one an entire planet to grow up on. The child could somehow leave half the ship disordered while he worked on the rest.  
Wolvwin followed Kakarotto through the ship, staying a few rooms behind him, cleaning up as well as was possible considering Kakarotto's amazing talent for totally devastating a room before he left it. All the while, the seventeen-year-old Saiyajin grumbled under his breath and swore in mixed Saiyago and Basic, the former of which was good for the extremely coarse profanity, the latter of which was good for the more creative curses. Even though Basic wasn't as complicated as Saiyago, the two combined made for some excellent and humiliating insults.  
Wolvwin had a very sound theology on swearing: do it often, do it loudly, be original, and don't practice in front of anyone who might be the butt of it later.  
Wolvwin's thoughts turned back to Kakarotto, whom he now called Carrot, and he smirked; in all fairness, if he was to be designated >>Da-dee,== then the child deserved the same treatment. A four-syllable name was too long for him anyway.  
It was really too bad that Carrot couldn't appreciate the art of good swearing. If the child had ever noticed how far Wolvwin went to find particularly nasty things to say, he'd have either gurgled or--more likely--paid better attention to Wolvwin's moods in order to become instantly docile when the older Saiyajin was in a bad one.  
The hope that Carrot would learn to sense his self-appointed Da-dee's moods so young was rather ridiculous, however. The four-month-old hadn't quite developed common sense yet, for Saiyajin children took far longer to do that than to teethe, talk, and walk. That happened to be another reason they were shipped off to other planets; few adult Saiyajin could control their tempers around idiotic young brats, so it was best to keep infants and growing children away from them.  
Therefore, Wolvwin had to follow the brat around and clean up after him; screaming in his face was no good, not at all. The first and last time that Wolvwin had tried it, Carrot had lost control of his bladder, making both of them miserable even after the mess was gone. The child didn't seem to mind being yelled at from behind, however. Perhaps he found Wolvwin's angry-face frightening.  
With a scowl, Wolvwin ducked into the next doorway--even though he wasn't tall, it had long ago become habit for him to immediately become defensive when he entered a room without first knowing exactly what occupied it--and halted in disbelief.  
There sat Carrot, and for once he'd performed his dark art, that genius for destruction, on himself rather than Wolvwin's ship; he was covered in something gooey and pink. Rather, he had saturated himself with something gooey and pink, for his clothes were covered with the nasty-smelling stuff, and he had treated it like shampoo, lathering it into both his hair and tail.  
"Da-dee!" he greeted, giggling as he brought his now pinkened tail up to his face to study it very carefully.  
"CA--" Wolvwin remembered halfway into his first high-pitched syllable that if he had to clean up something like this, he didn't want to have to clean up anything else with it. He took a long, long moment--a moment in which Carrot was giggling like a lunatic or very hyperactive four-month-old--then demanded, one syllable at a time, "What . . . is . . . that?" He pointed at the splattering of pink all over his walls so that there could be no doubt what he wanted to know.  
"Lunch!" Carrot answered, looking utterly pleased with himself as he gathered a handful of the stuff off the floor and flung it at Wolvwin. His aim wasn't very good yet, and his throwing arm wasn't strong, so Wolvwin merely had to shift his weight slightly to the right to avoid it.  
"Why aren't you eating this 'lunch' of yours, then, instead of--" Wolvwin began, interrupted by an ever-so-slight tremor underfoot.  
This more than alarmed poor Carrot, who began to wail halfway before Wolvwin's own slightly hysterical panic arose. Wolvwin shoved that panic down in a controlled way he'd never known he could, then walked over to Carrot and snatched him up, all the while feeling calm and distanced inside.  
He knew what this was. He didn't just have a speculation on what had befallen; he knew. What had been threatening to happen for the past four months had finally begun.  
Wolvwin was going to die, and not because he had been taunting death; it was very, very difficult to steer a ship when the ship was not fueled, even if he did happen to be in a place known as death on several thousand worlds or so. Not just a place that Furiiza controlled, but the ring of fifty worlds that Furiiza claimed as his own and his hearth. A place that Furiiza would defend, not necessarily with life and limb, but with his own power, the mighty force he held. That force was not something Wolvwin could hope to defeat--not now--and he knew it.  
He also knew that the Icejin was playing with him; if Furiiza had not been doing so, Wolvwin and Carrot would not even have felt what happened to remove them from this existence.  
Another tremor, this time not so slight, nearly bucked Wolvwin to the floor. Carrot wailed further, and to Wolvwin's displeasure, released a wet warmth onto Wolvwin's shirt.  
"If we live, you'll die just for that," he muttered as he floated up off the floor.  
Carrot only whimpered in reply, his tail wrapping around Wolvwin's wrist and his face buried in the upper--and dry--part of his Da-dee's shirt.  
It took three more of the vibrations, each longer and more violent, for Wolvwin to make his decision. He whirled around in the air, and darted break-neck through the soulless metal corridors of the ship, not slowing until he reached the door to the docking area, nor even slowing much as he slammed into said door, which splintered in all directions from the impact.  
He didn't slow once he was inside the docking area; he even escalated his already desperate speed, knowing that if this were not done now they would both die today.  
He pressed the button on the side of the ship. The plate of glass slid away from the entrance far too slowly as the ship shook further. This time, it continued trembling, and Wolvwin knew the end was soon.  
The moment that the entrance was large enough, he shoved Carrot in. He ignored the child's protests, didn't allow himself to feel anything, not now, not when so much was at stake, not when he could save the brat's life if he only hurried.  
"Da-dee!" Carrot screamed as Wolvwin checked the coordinates. They did not need adjustment; the ship would take the baby to Chikyuu. Wolvwin would be able to find him again--if they both lived.  
Wolvwin pressed the button again, and as the red plate slid back over the entrance--even more slowly than it had slid away--he strapped Carrot in the best he could while the child thrashed about and screamed in fury and terror.  
He pressed another button on the ship, then shot over to the wall to press a button there. The great metal doors started opening to space and the stars beyond. Wolvwin backed out of the docking area, unable to take his eyes off Carrot. The child was really screaming now, loudly enough so that he could be considered earsplitting even outside of the nearly soundproof walls of the pod.  
Wolvwin didn't notice the moisture in his eyes as he watched Carrot go. Nor when he dashed to his control room only to find that it wasn't there anymore. Nor when he saw Furiiza's ship as it hung in the darkness laughing at his fate. Nor when his ship collapsed around him. Nor even when he himself fell into darkness . . .


	2. Chapter One

Chapter One: Time Revisited  
At a desk in a small, brown-dominated room between Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the Mortal World, a very small boy sat in a very large, plush chair.   
He frowned down at a piece of college-lined paper, occasionally scribbling a few lines before screwing the cap back on the pen, closing his eyes, and muttering to himself in a low voice. Sometimes he would brush his fingers against the cold steel braces that held his crippled legs or push back a strand of blue-black hair when it fell into his face, but mostly he just sat.  
This boy's name was Briefs--just Briefs--and he had been dead for one thousand years, five months, and seventeen days.  
He was not a direct ancestor of the current day's Briefs family, having been twelve when he died, just a child on the brink of adolescence and the changes that came with it but not quite there yet. He was, however, directly related to several of their direct ancestors. This Briefs had been the first of that lineage to be called genius, and indeed the first of that line to be worthy of such an appellation.  
He had not always been crippled--an accident in his seventh year had crushed his legs, not quite anyone's fault but close enough that there was another who would always blame himself. The condition of his legs did not hinder his mobility enough to matter. Though not quite heaven--where he would have been made whole had he not chosen to stay closer to the Mortal Plane for the time being--this place was far more kindly to him than Earth had been. Often he was given the chance to gallivant through times and around worlds with Cron, though he chose to spent a great deal of his time here, reading. Enma-sama had some marvelous stuff. Why, after all the documentaries Briefs had read that outlined the functions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, he could have constructed any one of them on cue.  
Briefs preferred it here, if truth be told; a thousand years, five months, and seventeen days--give or take a century or two and a few weeks--had made him very comfortable here. He could concentrate here better than other places, anyway, probably because Cron was a loud person and insisted on accompanying him anywhere that wasn't here. Not, the Saiyajin claimed, because he was crippled, but because he was just a little twerp and who knew what could happen to him in the After World if he didn't have someone to take care of him.  
A corner of Briefs' usually frowning mouth turned upwards as he remembered how flustered the Time-God could get when one accused Cron of caring even the slightest bit or of catering to a crippled little boy who could get on perfectly well by himself.  
Then the smile faded back into a frown as inspiration whacked him once again between his ears, and he bent down to scribble a few more sentences onto his last, lonely, half-sentence paragraph. He read back over the sixteen pages of amazingly neat, even cursive for a twelve-year-old's hand, made a few revisions in between lines where he'd written something dumb or been too vague, then held it out before him, grinning.   
Cron was going to love this.  
As if he'd heard Briefs think his name, the Saiyajin made his entrance in the usual way: a brilliant flash of light followed by a great cloud of mist that looked like either dust or smoke but had no substance at all and only faded away when the god stepped out of it.   
He was wearing ridiculous clothes, this time--at least, they looked ridiculous to Briefs. He'd most often seen Cron in armor or long white robes that made him look important and wise. His outfit consisted of a pair of blue jeans covered with stains and a black t-shirt with lettering that was large at the top and grew gradually smaller in a sort of upside-down triangle, along with a pair of worn-out sneakers. That in itself wouldn't have been too awful--but the lettering of the shirt read "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me," and was currently making Briefs wonder about his friend's sanity, or lack thereof.  
Besides the small matter of his clothing, Cron looked like he normally did. He hadn't done a crazy thing like cut his hair, a fact for which Briefs silently thanked all the gods he knew, including the ones who would have gladly shaved Cron's head as a practical joke. His hair was still the wild, jet-black stuff resembling the widow's peak worn by his ancestors. His face, too, was the same, straight-featured with thick black eyebrows and equally dark eyes.  
"How are you getting on?" the god inquired the moment he seemed to think Briefs had noticed him enough. "Still alive?"  
Briefs allowed himself a wide smile; rather, the grin allowed him, as he couldn't help but grin whenever Cron showed up, especially on important days like this. "Sure," he agreed, reaching behind his neck to shove his ever-misplaced halo back in its rightful place above his head. "I'm fine. You?"  
Cron gave a snort followed by a quick swish of his blond tail, both of which seemed to say, "How could I be anything but all right? I'm Saiyajin, immortal, and a god as well; what else would I need to make me fine, stupid boy?" Then he actually did say it, just to make sure his point was clear.  
Briefs rolled his eyes, then said quickly, before Cron could vault onto the desk and do something awful like ruffle his hair, "I've figured out a way you can get revenge."  
The mischievous light in Cron's eyes faded in an instant, replace by something hard and cold that would have frightened the twelve-year-old prodigy had the boy not felt the exact same way. Briefs held out the sheaf of paper, now bound together by a paper clip.   
The Saiyajin appropriated it and flipped through the pages a few times before he waved a hand at the air beside him. A rickety wooden stool with a back--a stool not worthy of the name chair even though it seemed supposed to be one--appeared beside him. He straddled it backwards and began to read, seeming to go over each sentence thrice before going on to the next.  
After he'd finished, he glanced up at Briefs, that hard look gone and the roguishness present again on his face. "Oh, that's good. That's very, very good. Did anyone ever tell you that you're a genius, brat?"  
"Constantly. Since I began to read at two months old," Briefs replied with an impish grin so like the one Cron often wore, a grin ignorant of species difference.  
"Did anyone ever tell you that you're a very bad liar?" Cron smirked. "You have this awful habit of smirking when you're making something up . . . and I happen to know that you couldn't read until you were three. Your mother told me so."  
"Three months old, yep," Briefs chirped.   
Cron aimed a very light ki blast at Briefs, which did nothing but warm his left ear a bit and burn a tiny hole into his chair.  
"Enma-sama is going to love this," Cron muttered not too much later, after he'd roughed Briefs up as much as possible without actually hurting him. "He shall be negatively tickled."  
"If he kills you, I get first dibs on godhood, okay?" Briefs asked, only to have another ki blast thrown at him.

* * *  
Enma-sama frowned at Cron, the reason he kept that bushy beard and thick black glasses--he thought they aided with intimidation, especially when certain people acted oblivious to his size--becoming quite apparent as he did so. "No," he said after a few minutes of glaring at Cron in silence. "Absolutely not."  
"'No'!" Cron shouted as though he hadn't fully expected that, "What do you mean, 'no'?"  
"Look it up in the dictionary if you have a problem with one-syllable words," Enma suggested.  
Cron growled, crossing his arms and narrowing his eyes at the giant sitting on the other side of that enormous desk. "I am the God of Time. I don't need your permission to do anything."  
"Then what are you asking me for?" Enma glared. "I have a job to do! I don't have the time for your--" he faltered, then raised one eyebrow as he seemed to notice something for the first time. "And even if I might have changed my mind . . . 'Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me'?"  
Cron smiled and showed his teeth, a facial expression that made him look instantly dangerous. "Don't diss the shirt."  
Enma-sama's glare deepened as he seemed to wonder which era Cron had been floating around in to pick up such expressions. "What do you want from me, then, if you don't need my permission?"  
Cron smirked. "I'm going to pay someone a visit. But I can't take the kid with me, so you get to baby-sit." He considered for a moment. "Please."  
Enma was not impressed. "I don't think Briefs, of all people, needs a baby-sitter."  
"I'm not talking about Briefs."  
"Then who--" Enma's eyes widened. "No. Absolutely not."  
Cron shrugged. "You don't have a choice."  
"And why don't I?" Enma-sama demanded, standing up and towering over Cron.  
Cron smirked again, pulled a golden pocket watch out of his jeans, and spoke a low word in an ancient tongue. The timepiece glowed to white, and by the time it began to return to its original color, the Time-God had gone, leaving behind his usual dramatic mist and foregoing any explanation other than the barest one he'd already supplied.  
Enma-sama stared at what had been left on his desk and allowed himself a single groan. He was only able to half-comfort himself when he remembered that Cron was the only Saiyajin god that would ever be allowed, simply because of things like this.

* * *  
The girl would insist on closing her eyes.  
Just how was she supposed to defend herself if her eyes were closed? Had he not known better, he would have sworn she hadn't the tiniest drop of Saiyajin blood in her veins--no Saiyajin would ever have been caught wincing when a fist came towards their face.  
Vegeta snorted with disgust. "Keep your eyes open," he growled at his daughter.  
"Don't hit me and I will," Bra retorted.  
Just how was the brat supposed to learn anything if he didn't hit her? She wouldn't bring her arms up in defense unless she felt that he was going to hit her, yet when he did hit her she took to flinching away!  
Vegeta swore harshly in Saiyago and glared at his daughter, who pushed a stray strand of lavender hair behind her ear before swiping sweat from her forehead. She then glared at him, and it was her mother's glare, making it all the worse even if she was but fifteen years old.  
Vegeta glared back, having nothing else to do now that she'd obstinately refused to cooperate. He wondered why he'd ever thought he could train her. He certainly couldn't manhandle her as he had Trunks to convince her, for every time he even considered it his mind wandered back to the first time his eyes had latched onto her, a tiny, wrinkled, purplish-red infant hooked up to about ten separate machines to stay alive. He hadn't been able to hurt her then either, though some voice inside his head had screamed at him, saying that no Saiyajin child that weak should be allowed to live, half human or not, born premature or not.  
Vegeta swore again.  
He wondered how anyone, including those whom had already had the training of her, could stand such obstinacy. He also wondered how anyone, even Kakarotto's youngest, could be so inept as to neglect to teach his daughter defense if she was to be taught anything at all. He'd been almost pleased when she'd told him that she'd already been training, because that meant that he shouldn't have to teach her the basics, like keeping her eyes open when someone was about to strike her. Apparently, the three years she claimed she'd trained with everyone from Kakarotto to Kuririn had been wasted.  
Now he was no longer anywhere near pleased.  
At this point, just as the Prince was about to express his disgust virulently and with a great deal of profanity in several languages, he felt a small ki flutter somewhere nearby--exactly where, he couldn't tell, for either it was being suppressed or it belonged to a weak person. He couldn't identify it; he had never felt this particular ki signature before.  
He felt like he ought to recognize it, however, or he wouldn't have done what he did next, which was to frown and close his eyes, following the petty ki around with his mind and trying to discover just where it came from.  
"If I were you, 'Geta-san, I'd open my eyes b'fore I get hit from behind," advised someone with a laugh. The voice, definitely female and even more definitely young, came from behind him. Not that he even needed to have noticed that to know who this was--only one person called him that, as his children called him Papa, his mate called him several ruder things, and everyone else just knew him as Vegeta.  
Vegeta whirled around and glared at Kakarotto's sole granddaughter floating several inches above the ground with her arms crossed. "What are you doing here, brat?"  
"Came to train," the girl shrugged, crouching ever so slightly once her toes met the tiled floor of the gravity room, her voice losing most of its humor and becoming matter-of-fact.  
Vegeta snorted. "What makes you think I'd bother with you?"  
Pan's smirk was a small one, barely differing from the smile she occasionally employed. "'Cause if you don't, she will never cooperate."  
As though the girl thought he couldn't figure out who 'she' referred to, Pan jabbed her thumb at Bra. Taking his silent glance at his daughter and following roll of his eyes as consent, she tossed her backpack lightly by the gravity controls and crouched lower, battle in her eyes. Vegeta watched this with amusement, surprised at the depth of the warrior's scowl on her face, more surprised that she was comfortable enough in this gravity to be able to look like she was 'lightly' tossing anything.  
He failed to notice at first that Bra's expression mirrored Pan's.

* * *  
Cron sat on top of the Capsule Corp. building, inhaling deeply and much enjoying the scent of Earth, albeit it was riddled with the filthy smell of human factories, cars, and "progress" in general.  
It had been a long, long time since he'd been able to sit for even a few minutes and feel this sun on his face, this wind around him, the quiet, magnificent peace one could always find in the out-of-doors of Chikyuu if one only looked.  
He could feel what went on in the small, roundish structure in the back yard, and had decided minutes ago to let it reach its pinnacle before he did anything, more for his own comfort than Shorty's.  
His tail unfurled from his waist and swished behind him in time with the calm ticking of his watch. He pulled the timepiece out of his pocket and made a "humph" noise and a face when he saw what it showed. He'd have less time than he'd thought.  
Time was a fickle master, as the God of Time well knew.  
With a sigh, he sprang to his feet and hopped off the roof, floated to the ground. He strode with purpose up to the door of the gravity room, realized he'd forgotten how to open the thing--or had he ever known? Difficult to say--and considered swearing but didn't. Rather, he held up the pocket watch and murmured a phrase in a thick tongue. This time he forewent his usual dramatics, disappearing with barely a flash and reappearing near an inside wall of the gravity room with the same.  
It would take at least a few minutes for Shorty to notice him, he was certain of that; his descendant was currently very, very busy trying to ward off his daughter and her friend, and not doing a very good job of it. Cron thought that perhaps that was Vegeta's purpose, for the Prince had not even gone Super Saiyajin yet. He was tailoring his power to fit theirs, to teach them rather than render them unconscious.  
A younger Prince that Cron had known would never have bothered. The god had known that the Prince had changed, but he hadn't been certain if it had been quite this much--there were too many people he liked to keep track of for him to focus very much on any one person.   
Cron smiled and leaned against the wall, very visible in his black T-shirt, though it did not matter since Shorty was too absorbed in the fight to even glance in the god's direction.  
This was going to be interesting.

* * *  
In an ancient darkness buried adjacent to the fiery place where Shenron slept, something stirred for the first time in nearly a millennium. It did not quite awaken, not yet--but it soon would, for already the conditions that kept it in slumber were changing, and for its enemies' benefit rather than its own.


	3. Chapter Two

Chapter Two: Bulma and the Tooth Fairy  
Vegeta glared darkly at a particular spot on the wall, knowing whom he'd seen there nary an hour before and waiting for the fellow to come back. An ominous endurance hardened his features and suggested he'd once been a statue.  
He knew his eyes had not deceived him, for he had excellent eyesight. At any rate, every time he'd ever glimpsed Cron the god had returned after a short while in order to shake his head at Vegeta's actions, offer advice, or prophesize doom. The first was annoying, the second sometimes helpful, and the third pitiful since Cron never spoke of imminent death unless the god was quite drunk.  
He'd glimpsed the other Saiyajin out of the corner of his eyes, and, being Vegeta, with pride ballooned to the size of Chikyuu and a dear dread of looking foolish in front of the offspring, had neither yelped nor halted in surprise.   
Rather, he had flung Kakarotto's granddaughter and Bra into the wall first, then fixed a half-second glare back at where Cron had been before meeting the girls with a few punches and ki blasts. He'd taken two and a half minutes to make them work enough that they'd feel it later, then ordered them out. Pan had looked quite offended, and Bra had given him a wounded look followed by the mouthing of a word she'd often heard him say in Saiyago.  
He would make it up to them sometime; he wanted a chance to properly kick their asses during the length of an entire afternoon, preferably an afternoon following a morning of intense training. He'd done such things often with Trunks, but never with his daughter, and he'd warmed to the idea since Bra had decided to show her full worth in battle.  
But before that ever happened, he'd likely have to deal with Cron. He was fairly certain he could handle it . . . as long as it didn't involve time travel.  
Vegeta despised time travel. He'd experienced enough of it in youth to know he loathed it, enough to get a sour taste in his mouth whenever the thought came to his mind.  
He did not feel quite that badly about the memory of Mirai Trunks' journey through time. That had been a different sort of ramble, a real travel rather than a cruel manipulation of the waves upon which Time rode.  
He felt the same way about the God of Time as he did about time travel for several very good, valid reasons. Never mind all that Cron had done to ensure Vegeta's survival; Vegeta would have done the same in his place, if only to preserve the line.  
No matter at moment that Vegeta hated Cron, he just wanted to know where the god was. Better to hear bad tidings and whatnot now rather than wondering what they would be . . .  
Pop! A sudden glare of light, a silver cloud of mist, and Cron stood not seven feet from Vegeta, blonde tail waving in the air beside him.  
"Are they deep thoughts or did your face finally decide to get stuck that way?" asked Cron as the mist faded. He tucked his golden timepiece into his pocket and seemed utterly oblivious to Vegeta's stony glare.  
"What the Hell are you doing here?" Vegeta growled in reply. His arms crossed, he drummed his fingers on his upper arm just above his elbow.  
Cron sighed, his tail's motion changing to a short, resolute swing. "You shall never understand pleasantries, Shorty. 'Hello, you sorry bastard' should come before 'what the Hell' anything. They can even be in the same sentence, but a greeting comes first."  
"Shut up," Vegeta snarled, uncrossing his arms and waving a threatening fist. He almost continued with a train of thought involving Cron's sensitive body parts and their removal but interrupted himself with a puzzled, "'Can't sleep, clowns will eat me'?"  
Cron grinned. "Aye-yup."  
Vegeta considered his aforementioned train of thought for a couple of seconds before discarding it in lieu of finding out just what Cron wanted. "What are you doing here?"  
Cron sighed again and leaned his back against the wall. He crossed both arms and ankles. "Manipulating the fabric of time and the mandate of reality in order to accomplish my own questionable means."  
Vegeta snorted at this. "I don't doubt that, idiot! I meant specifically."  
The god shrugged. "You mean, what does my being here have to do with you and yours?" He did not wait for an answer before continuing with, "Well, a good deal of it's a secret, but the precise fact of the matter is, if you'll excuse the clichéé--"  
"JUST TELL ME!" Vegeta roared, just now realizing how uneasy Cron's visit had made him. A vein popped up on his forehead.  
Cron narrowed his eyes and looked grumpily offended as he said, "Fine. I'm giving you Carrot. If you want him, that is."  
Vegeta Wolvwin, having expected a great many things but definitely not this, couldn't find anything to say for reply, and as result became speechless for one of the few times in his life.

* * *  
The top drawer of a dresser was a sacred place where numerous personal, hallowed items could be discovered hiding under socks and among underwear. Bulma knew this very well, which was why she'd saved this part for last and done such things as empty the lower drawers and take the sheets off the bed first.  
It still felt like sacrilege, though, and probably always would; one simply didn't go through one's parents' personal things, no matter how long they'd been gone. A year, five years . . . even if they'd been in their graves twenty it wouldn't have made her feel any better about this. Yes, it felt like The Right Time, after all of nearly six years, but still . . . it seemed impious, much more so than the rest of the deed had . . .   
Closets, desks, under beds . . . none of that compared to top dresser drawers.  
Bulma took a deep breath, let it out slowly, took another deep breath, then yanked the drawer open.  
Her very first reaction to its contents was a burst of nervous, schoolgirl giggles that turned into hearty laughter about twenty giggles in.  
Daddy had worn boxers!

* * *  
It took Bulma a few minutes to calm down. Those minutes were her laughter turned to tears turned to calm silence as she laid the boxers to the side and began to sort through the rest of the drawer's contents.  
There were some very interesting, very amusing, and very touching things in her parents' top dresser drawer. One of the very first things Bulma found was that her mother had kept every Mother's Day card Bulma had ever given her. Every single one, even the one with the little stick figure with a crown on its head proclaiming in a voice-bubble, "Queen Bulma wishes you a Happy Muther's Day!" She'd even kept the store-bought cards, which dated from every Mother's Day following Bulma's twelfth birthday.  
She found that there were only a few Father's Day cards. She knew this was because she'd forgotten most Father's Days, though she could have blamed it on her father's absent-mindedness.  
Laying the stack of cards beside her on the bed, she continued looking, that feeling of invading now matched by a thrilled discovery. No matter how intrigued she was, Bulma was very glad that her parents had shared the dresser and that she only had to do this once. It was almost enough to make her think about sharing dressers with Vegeta, just in case.  
Almost, but not quite. She doubted she'd be able to survive that either.  
Most of the rest were small odds and ends, most of them trinkets that held no value for her except that one or both of her parents must have treasured them. There were buttons in there, old-issue dollar bills she doubted could be spent anymore, pictures of people she didn't recognize plus one of Mama she supposed she'd have to burn, and about a dozen pairs of eyeglasses ranging from normal glasses to the kind with nose and eyebrows attached. There were quite a few other things in there as well, and she must have spent an hour going through them.  
And then, once everything else was taken from the drawer, Bulma spotted a stack of lopsided index cards in a far corner. Feeling momentarily puzzled, she picked up the top card, turned it over, and found herself torn between laughing again, gasping, and bursting into tears.  
For, above her father's scrawl which noted, "Bulma's 1st - 5 yr., 3 mos.," a small tooth had been glued to the card.  
Bulma had spent many hours wondering about her parents and the things they did, both before they'd gone and after. But she had never, not even after having learned the tooth fairy wasn't real, wondered which parent had been the tooth fairy and what they'd done with their trophies.  
Now she knew.  
And she also knew that she didn't know what she felt about this, and not just because Daddy had always seemed much more interested in his inventions and such than her.  
She had done the exact same thing with Trunks' and Bra's baby teeth, and those index cards were under the socks in her own top dresser drawer.  
Blinking back tears, Bulma tenderly placed the stack of cards in her lap and began to look through them, smiling as she remembered the circumstances under which some teeth had been lost. None were in order save the first one, a testament to Daddy's tendency to neglect to organize the little things.  
She didn't cry until she found the card that said "Bulma's 6th - 7 yr., 6 mos." She'd swallowed that tooth by accident, and Daddy had written "Indisposed" in the middle of the card right where he would have glued it.  
She wiped her eyes a minute or two later and was still sniffling when something twinkled at her from the corner of the drawer where she'd found the cards. She gave that corner a sharp glance, a glance met by another twinkle. She looked closer and saw the vague shape of an item that had been hidden from view by the index cards. She reached back to pick it up, brought it out into the light, and promptly became perplexed.  
What on Earth?  
A smallish, coin-shaped medallion of some sort, it was about the size of a half-dollar and doubly as thick, with notched edges like a dime or a quarter. It was a golden-red color like new copper, and it had the strangest engraving on one side: a sitting wolf, with head pointed upwards as though howling at the moon. On the other side, it had no picture; rather, a series of foreign symbols ran across it.  
How very odd . . .   
After a moment of consideration, Bulma put everything back in the drawer and slid it back into the dresser, not feeling she had the right to disband the items right now. She kept the medallion, however, something inside telling her that it was the one thing that didn't belong there. She sat on her parents' stripped mattress and stared at it for a time.  
As she stared at it, it seemed to glow and grow warm in her hands. The room around her seemed to grow fuzzy, and the sensible part of her told her to worry about this but another part of her said to shut up.  
Soon, she could see nothing but fuzzy colors as the warmth from the medallion spread up her arms and through the rest of her body, the colors changing and sharpening to reveal a scene long hidden in the depths of Bulma's memory, a happening the years had chosen to forget . . . 

* * *  
She'd just had a bad dream. A very bad dream, the kind that would have made any other six-year-old scream for her mother, but she was more independent than most children her age and scoffed at the notion of adult help in anything.   
The girl sat up in bed, her lamp on (she did not scoff at important things like lights), watching the shadows on the wall, wary of the things from her dreams because they'd seemed akin to shadows.  
She watched two shadows in particular that seemed to be taking shapes unlike any the other shadows could. The other shadows were bound by whatever object light shone on to create them; these two didn't come from anything Bulma could see, so they could be anything they wanted. They weren't scary, though, not like her dreams. There was something . . . oddly comforting about one, something strangely irritating about the other.  
Then, just as she could see that the shapes were of people with weird, pointy heads, a whirlpool appeared on her wall. At least, it looked like a whirlpool, only with orange and purple colors rather than the blue shades of real water whirlpools.  
True to Briefs form, she wanted to go and touch it and see what it could be, but something inside, a voice that was always right, told her she'd better not, so she didn't.  
Instead, she watched and waited.  
She didn't have to wait for more than thirty seconds or so because two forms stumbled out of the whirlpool from Somewhere Else. She knew in an instant, with a six-year-old's wisdom, that they were the same as the shapes that had been on her wall.  
One of them, a short person with black-red hair shaped like a flame, was covered with black smudges and nasty looking scrapes. He was coughing, cursing, and generally being loud, which irritated Bulma, because it was after bedtime and people were supposed to be quiet after seven o'clock at night. The other person, a taller fellow with hair that spiked out differently than the short man's did, wore long white robes with only a few smudges on them and had a sparkling, golden watch in his right hand.  
"I'm gonna call security if you can't be quiet," Bulma informed the short man with an air of absolute importance, "And stop cussing, please."  
The tall man snorted, and Bulma threw him a sharp look. He straightened up and addressed the still-cursing short man by saying, "Are you all right, Shorty?"  
The short man straightened, stopped yelling, and snapped, "If I'm not, it's your own damned fault, so don't even ask." He paused for a second before saying, "Where the Hell are we, anyway?" He glanced at Bulma. "And who's the brat?"  
Bulma was about to open her mouth and yell at him for calling her a brat, but before she could get over the immediate, speechless indignation, the tall man hastened to say, "About . . . well, about the same time, Chikyuu."  
Something in the short man's face changed, making him look much, much younger than he had at first. He stumbled over to Bulma's bed and sat on the foot of it near her feet. She almost told him to get his dirty butt off, but he looked like he might fall down if he stood up, so she decided to just glare at him instead.  
"And the girl . . ." the tall man sighed, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. "The girl's named Bulma. Bulma Briefs."  
The short man's head shot up and his eyes widened as he stared at Bulma. "Briefs?" he asked.  
"Yes," the tall man answered, "She's related to him, if distantly." He seemed to think a minute before adding, "We're not here for long. Just a few minutes . . . just long enough to accomplish something."  
Bulma took the following silence to cross her arms over her chest, frown-pout at both of them, and say, "Who are you and what do you want?"  
The short man opened his mouth, but the tall man answered, "He is the tooth fairy."  
The short man's mouth dropped open. "WHAT?"  
"Fairy: a little tiny creature with wings that usually wears a pink tutu or badman shirt . . ."  
"I am NOT the tooth fairy!" the short man protested, then added, "A whatman shirt?"  
"Play along," the tall man advised, "and you'll find out eventually."  
The short man turned to Bulma. "Do I look like the tooth fairy to you?" he demanded.  
Bulma shook her head. "No. You couldn't be. I haven't even lost any teeth for a long time."  
The short man crossed his arms and leaned back, sending a scowl at the other man.  
The tall man sighed again. "Never mind." He seemed to perk up a bit when he added, "You remember what I gave you at the end of the first trip?" When the short man nodded, he continued, "Well, you need to give that to her." He pointed at Bulma to make himself very clear.  
"Give what to me?" Bulma asked, cheering up now that it seemed she was to be given a present. She pushed away the covers and half hopped over beside the short man, who looked dubious at being at such close quarters with her.  
"I'll let you two negotiate," the tall man said, disappearing with a pop and a flash of light.  
Had Bulma been any older than six, she might have had trouble believing that a man could just up and disappear like that. But at six, reality and fantasy had only just begun to separate in her mind.  
"Give me what?" Bulma inquired again, batting her eyelashes sweetly up at the short man.  
He grunted and reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, bringing out something golden-red colored that gleamed. He held it out for her to see, and her breath caught in her throat as she looked at it.  
She reached out to touch it, to hold it, but the man batted her hand away. She made a small sound of protest, and he grunted before saying, "I can't just give this to you. Such things only work when traded, so you'd best not touch it until I say you can."  
Bulma opened her mouth to proclaim the unfairness of this at the top of her capable lungs but ending up saying in a whisper, "What is it?"  
He frowned at her, and she suddenly noticed the darkness in his onyx eyes as he answered, "Protection."  
"What kinda protection?"  
"Magic protection. Powerful magic protection. I don't know why you'd need it, though," he answered. "Surely your mouth alone would be enough to scare any threat away."  
"But I haven't said hardly anything!" Bulma protested with a child's vigor.  
"You've said enough to tell," he growled. "Any child who talks like you do has a big mouth."  
Bulma gritted her teeth and balled up her fists. "I do NOT!" she protested, waving a fist at him.  
Presented with the sight of a small girl threatening him, he blinked and sat there looking stunned for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth quirked up and he looked just about to laugh at her. "You do too." As she was about to protest for the third time, he hastened to add, "Look, girl, I'm not going to listen to you whine about what you aren't and don't have. I want to go home, and I can't do that if I'm here bickering with a four-year-old."  
He looked very sad for the second after he said home, as though he wished he could take the word back.  
"I'm six!" Bulma growled, though not as ferociously as she might have.  
The man rolled his eyes. "Well, whatever you are, we need to get this done. I'll give this to you, but you have to give me something for it." He looked sullen at this point, as though he didn't think anything she had would be a proper trade.  
"What do you want?" Bulma asked graciously.  
"I don't care," he answered.  
Offended, Bulma snapped, "Well, I do! Figure out something!"  
She would have added that she wasn't going to accept something so pretty and wonderful if she couldn't reciprocate in full. But she was a very tired six-year-old who should have been asleep, and even her big vocabulary seemed averse to her at this hour.  
The man closed his eyes with a sigh, looked like he was thinking for a few minutes, then opened his eyes and said, "Unless you have a time machine or chocolate, I can't think of one damned thing."  
Bulma frowned at the swear word, but decided to ignore it. "No time machine . . ." she said, tucking the idea away for something to invent when she was all grown up, "But . . ." she hopped off her bed and ran over to her dresser, pulling open the top drawer. She dug under her socks and came out with a big bag full of mini candy bars. "Some of this is chocolate," she announced, leaping back onto the bed and holding it out to him, "And you could have it, I guess . . ."  
His eyebrows arched upward and he made a long "hmm" noise she could tell was intended to make her nervous. She glared at him and he stopped. He took the bag from her hand, peered at it, and after a few minutes of examining it, laid it down on the bed beside him and handed her the medallion. She brought it up to her face and saw the picture etched onto one side. "It's a wolf," she said.  
He rolled his eyes as he tore open the wrapping on one candy bar. "What did you think it would be?"  
"Dunno," Bulma answered, flipping it over and frowning at the alien symbols on the back. She could read, but not whatever this was. "What's this say?"  
He leaned over to look at it, muttering under his breath, and said, "Something about how it's protection against magic, I would suppose."  
"Can't you read it?"  
"Of course I can't! It was made a thousand years ago; it's not from my era," he snarled, licking chocolate off his fingers and dropping the candy wrapper onto the blanket.  
Bulma made a face as she slipped the medallion over her head. "Put your wrapper in the trash," she ordered.  
He narrowed his eyes as he tore open another wrapper and dropped it beside the last one. "No," he said in a flat, emotionless tone.  
"Ooooooo!" Bulma snatched the candy wrappers up and stomped over to the wastebasket by her desk. "You already got my room dirty; you don't have to get trash all over it!" she shouted, "You big jerk!"  
"'You big jerk'?" he repeated, barking a laugh as though he'd never been called names six-year-old style before, "Do you show that much respect to all of your elders?"  
Bulma dropped the candy wrappers in the wastebasket and walked back across the room to stand at the foot of her bed and scowl at him. "You're not that old. I'll bet you're not even as old as my Daddy."  
He laughed again. "Not unless he sired you when he was about ten!"  
Sensing that this was an insult of some kind, Bulma wrinkled up her nose and thought about this a while before asking, "What is 'sired'?"  
Wherever the smudges on his face weren't, the man's color seemed to darken; he actually sputtered for a few seconds before putting on a solemn facet and saying, "That's not something strangers talk to little girls about. Ask your otousan when I'm gone."  
Bulma, fuming now--no child likes to be reminded of being a child--snapped, "I hope you're gone soon."  
To her surprise, this made the man look sad even though he said, "Me too, brat." She must have sent him a questioning look, because he elaborated, "I don't like feeling trapped."  
"You're not trapped!" Bulma exclaimed, "The door's right there!" She pointed.  
He shook his head. "I could use that, yes. And get myself killed. I don't know what kinds of advances you people have made in the last thousand years!" He pointed at the window. "If Cron doesn't come back soon, I'll take that way out."  
Bulma decided that 'Cron' was the person who had decided to disappear. "At least you'll be able to see if you have to use the window," she remarked, "because there's a full moon tonight."  
The man stiffened, and for a moment Bulma felt how trapped he was through the expression on his face. He swore harshly and worse than he had before. "I can't leave, then," he moaned, rubbing his forehead.  
"Why not?" Bulma asked, curious though a bit frightened.  
"Several reasons. One, I like this planet. Two, I've had chocolate. Three, chocolate and full moons together are . . . just not an option."  
"Why?"  
"Why what?"  
"Why aren't chocolate and full moons an option?" Bulma clarified.  
He stared at her. "You don't know the slightest thing about Saiyajin, do you?"  
"What're Saiyajin?"  
He groaned. "That's a story too long to tell, girl."  
"But I like long stories."  
"Not this one," he insisted.  
"But--" Bulma started.  
"But nothing!" he roared, "Shut up, whelp!"  
Bulma, who wasn't entirely certain what 'whelp' meant, was so tired of arguing with the man that she slapped him as hard as she could on the arm.  
He winced and hissed at her. Before she could jump away, he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her up over the headboard. He held up the index finger of one hand and the end of it started to glow white as a small sphere of . . . something . . . started to form at his fingertip. Still holding her by the arm, he brought that . . . something . . . to the tip of her nose and snarled, "If I weren't almost tipsy right now, you'd be meeting your token god."  
"Let me go!" she yelped, crying out when he twisted her arm just a little.  
"Fine." He let go of her arm and pushed up his shirtsleeve so that she could see the burn mark that had been where she'd hit. He seemed to be trying to make a point: that her slap would not have hurt him if he hadn't already been hurt. "Touch me again and you'll need the tooth fairy."  
Didn't 'tipsy' mean drunk?  
He didn't smell drunk.  
Bulma scowled at him. "You don't smell tipsy," she informed him, "you smell like smoke and chocolate and pepper."  
"Exactly!"  
"Exactly what?"  
"I smell like chocolate . . ." he said, his tail unwrapping from around his waist.  
Bulma stared. "You have a tail," she whispered, eyes wide.  
"Of course," he agreed, "I told you I'm Saiyajin, didn't I?"  
Bulma couldn't stop herself. She reached out and grabbed it, subconsciously realizing to be as gentle with it as she had to be with Daddy's cats. It felt strange, sort of soft and sort of coarse at the same time, as though it hadn't yet decided which it would be.  
"I thought I told you not to touch me again," he growled to no effect as she petted his tail.  
Its end twitched in her palm, tickling her. "Wow . . ." she said, glancing up at his face to see if he really minded having his tail petted or was just making token protest, "Cool . . ."  
His tail slipped out of her hands and furled back around his waist. "Go to sleep," he said, sliding off her bed and striding over to her desk to sit on top of it. He didn't look exactly displeased at her comments about his tail, but he didn't look happy about them either.  
To her absolute surprise, Bulma obeyed him and slipped under the covers, putting her head on her pillow, the medallion around her neck making her feel warm all over. She slept before she realized she slept . . .   
She dreamt as well, without realizing that either or remembering even a portion of her dreams. She dreamt about the man with the tail, whose name she'd not even gotten to ask . . . she dreamt about Cron returning, the two talking, Cron saying that she was about the man's age in the proper time . . . and they walked back into a whirlpool with the short man demanding to know what Cron was insinuating . . .   
She dreamt about the man returning to his own time, about the years that hardened him, and about his return to her that only he realized was a return . . . she dreamt about their sons, one fully hers and one a visitor from another time . . . she dreamt about their daughter . . .   
She dreamt about things that were to be and things that would never be and forgot every bit of it in the morning.  
She gave the medallion to Daddy to take care of, somehow sensing that she wasn't supposed to have it yet.  
As well as forgetting her dreams, she forgot that night with a completeness that was to frighten her when she remembered . . . 

* * *  
Her parents' room returned to her and she felt weak in her stomach as she stood up. With wide eyes reminiscent of that six-year-old's, she gazed at the wolf medallion in her hands for a long, long while before slipping the chain over her head and leaving in search of Vegeta.

* * *  
"Carrot?" Vegeta croaked. "Carrot?"  
Cron smiled. "That's what I said. Four months old and covered with unrecognizable pink slime. Do you want him?"  
"Hell yes, I want him," Vegeta croaked again, not even noticing Cron's smirk at the fact that the he was croaking.  
"All right then," Cron said, rubbing his hands together. "I'll be right back."  
With a familiar pop!, flash of light, and mist, Cron vanished, to return about two seconds later holding out a spiky haired baby and wrinkling his nose. He'd been wise to hurry. A waiting Vegeta in such a moment was a touchy, dangerous Vegeta.  
"Da-dee!" Carrot squealed, waving his arms at Vegeta.  
"He stinks," Cron informed the Prince as he handed the infant over, "but I'm sure you don't mind." So saying, he vanished again, this time to stay gone for well over a year.  
After a few days, Vegeta would come out of his haze and want to know why Cron had given him the child, what he really meant to come of this. For now, he was simply too shocked to think about anything but cleaning up the baby. He was too shocked to even wonder at the speed at which he'd been asked about it, confirmed the idea, and been given the infant.   
He left his gravity room and strode towards the nearest bathroom. But just as he stepped into a hallway with a bathroom, he almost ran into his mate . . . who had a look on her face he'd never seen before.  
Bulma crossed her arms under her chest, glared at him, and said, "Tooth fairy, huh?"  
Vegeta froze. "Tooth . . . fairy?" he asked in a dull tone before seeing the medallion handing from her neck. "Oh . . ."   
"Yes. 'Oh.'" Bulma's glare deepened.  
That was when she noticed Carrot.  
Her glare disappeared and she looked at him with a look positioned somewhere between hurt, puzzlement, and exhaustion, a second look he'd never seen before on her face. "Vegeta . . ." she said, her voice beginning in a whisper but gaining strength as she went on, "Start explaining. Now."


	4. Chapter Three

Chapter Three: Adjustments  
Vegeta never explained anything to anyone unless he thought he was being gracious by divulging whatever it was. Sometimes he decided not to explain at all just to be an ass.   
Bulma had long ago thought Vegeta enjoyed their fights and, aided by watching him carefully during the height of their arguments, had equally long ago decided she was right. This was why she didn't expect an answer right away and was only a smidgen puzzled when he looked blank and kept his mouth closed. Her surprise came from the lack of smirk, sneer, scowl, frown, or any other sort of exasperating superior expression on his face.  
Glaring her hottest glare, Bulma gave him a few more seconds to talk.  
As Vegeta always chose an argument over submission, she was not surprised when he dropped the stunned look and scowled back at her. He didn't open his mouth, probably sensing that this was, indeed, a contest involving wills and whose could produce the most potent Look. Of course, she knew the answer to that, and Vegeta probably did too.   
Bulma had spent a great deal of time perfecting The Look even before she'd met him, testing various versions on a large group of unfortunate people including Yamucha, Son-kun, and Kuririn. She was currently on version seven point five, and it was the most potent so far. She had yet to make Vegeta wither under her glare, highly doubted and very much hoped he never would. A withering Vegeta wouldn't be a quarter as fun as a scowling, too proud, pouty, overreacting, impossibly haughty Vegeta.  
He wasn't the only one who enjoyed their fights.  
They might have gone on like that, simply glaring at one another, for hours--they'd done it more than once before--but for one factor. Bulma's glare, though directed at Vegeta's person, was still quite effective on other people--particularly small, helpless people who'd never seen Bulma before.  
The baby--or toddler--only had to see The Look for about five seconds before deciding he didn't like it. With a beginning wail, he began to complain in a voice tethered somewhere between a yell and a sob. Reminiscent of tantrum-throwing two-year-olds everywhere, he began to wiggle and thrash in Vegeta's grip and continued even when Vegeta held him out at arms' length.  
He continued to cry until Bulma snatched him out of a snarling Vegeta's arms. When Vegeta protested, Bulma ordered him to go get Trunks' baby clothes and to be careful when making a hole for the baby's tail. Surprisingly, he obeyed with only a low, murmured insult she didn't quite catch.  
The fact that the infant had a tail was not one that escaped Bulma, nor one to dissuade her from trying to comfort the poor thing. A baby was a baby was a baby, tail or not, stiff spiky hair or not, Saiyajin or not. And this was a pretty damn cute baby, too.  
A pretty damn cute baby who looked like Son-kun, only smaller.  
Bulma pointed this last out to Vegeta as she worked suds into the baby's stiff-furred, pink-tinted tail. He gave her an answer and told her a story, telling her to make certain she listened lest he not feel accommodating enough to relay it again later. Of course, he didn't phrase it so nicely, but that was his meaning.  
By the time she'd rinsed the gunk out of the baby's tail, Vegeta supplied her with a name--Carrot--and the fact that the baby and Son-kun were technically the same person. Before she was done working all of the pink out of Carrot's hair, Vegeta relayed a short, pointed story about how he as a teenager had been taken out of his time by the God of Time. According to him, the first time they'd gone to was none of Bulma's concern; she did not dispute this, at the moment only wanting answers to questions.   
The second time, he claimed, he'd been dropped into a malfunctioning spaceship just after Vejiitasei blew up. At the time, he'd still been using his other name, Wolvwin--which was to Vegeta as Bulma was to Briefs--he said. He had seen a small spacepod which had apparently been about to fall apart, and had salvaged it at telepathic urging from Cron--whom, it seemed, had not trusted him to be compassionate enough to save it and its occupant on his own. Inside the pod had been a newborn third-class infant by name of Kakarotto. Vegeta had, for reasons he refused to divulge and which Bulma suspected involving his possessing a heart, taken care of this infant for four months. After that time, Vegeta's junk spaceship was attacked by Furiiza's quite functional and therefor deadly spaceship, and he'd only just been able to send Carrot--Kakarotto, Son-kun, Goku, whatever--off before the Time God winked back into that time to save him.  
Then came the interesting part of this story.  
As Bulma rinsed Carrot's hair and as the baby consequently began to scream from imagined soap in his eyes, Vegeta stopped his tale. He thought for a minute, and by the time Bulma had baby-talked Carrot into hushing, he'd begun speaking again. This time, however, he only said that directly after the collapsing of that ship, Cron had taken him to another time for another task. It had been simple, and it had involved giving a very precious pendant to a very bratty five-year old with blue hair. To this, Bulma replied that she had not been bratty. And she'd not been five, either--she had been six.  
This might have resulted in another of those glaring matches, but getting Carrot into Trunks' clothing was daunting. The fit wasn't bad, but he, according to his whimpers and refusal to lift his arms up, didn't want to get dressed. By the time he was in the pajama outfit, Bulma and Vegeta both had forgotten about arguing.  
Bulma scrounged around in the storerooms for about thirty minutes, systematically releasing the contents of capsules until she found a crib. She set it up in the room she and Vegeta shared, vowing to her husband that if Carrot woke her in the night, Vegeta would be sleeping on the couch with the crib moved into the living room. Leaving Carrot sleeping in the crib, Vegeta standing a few feet from him with deep quiet-I'm-thinking creases in his forehead, she made her way towards Laboratory Number Five. If she didn't meet Trunks or Bra in the hall on the way there--in which case she would relay the story to them first--she intended to type out the entire thing and save it in her files. She doubted she would ever forget it, for it was a very interesting story and told her more about Vegeta's past than he'd ever told her before in one sitting. But it never hurt to take notes; Bulma knew this from a lifetime of experiences both memorable and not.

* * *  
The flower delivery guy--also known as Kytte, but few people outside of family, drinking buddies, and soon-to-be ex-wife knew his first name--did not like his route. He liked his job well enough, namely because he had the good luck not to be allergic to anything but cactus and had yet to deliver an order of that desert plant. His complaint had to do with the driving part: somehow, mountain roads made him nervous. Maybe it was the sharp turns. Or maybe it was the sharp, winding roads up and down the mountain, turns with either very rickety-looking or nonexistent guardrails.  
He frowned at his own sense of caution, which was utterly out of place when he was nowhere near a cliff or narrow road. Still frowning, he stepped out of his truck with a single red rose, card attached, in one hand, and a clipboard in the other.  
If someone was going to send roses all the way out here, it would have been somewhat more comforting to know that he was risking his life for more than one flower.  
Then again, considering the recipient, no amount of flowers would have reassured him.  
He walked up to the door of the residence and rang the doorbell, waited none-too-patiently for someone to answer it. He tucked his clipboard under his arm and was just about to ring the bell again when the door opened.  
"Delivery for Son Pan," he said out of habit, even though both he and the man who'd opened the door knew what he'd brought. "Another flower for her trash bin . . ." He smiled slightly at this statement, although he thought he sounded more as though he was complaining than making a joke.  
Gohan chuckled, reached for the clipboard, and signed for the rose even as he called over his shoulder, "Pan, come get your plant life."  
A short pause. Then, a girl's voice calling back, "Who's it from?"  
Kytte and the girl's father both started; usually she just stated that they should trash it, never mind which of her two spurned suitors had sent flowers this time.  
Kytte flipped open the card and read off the name. Pan's father shouted, "Starling!" He shrugged, his face assuming a whoever-that-is expression.  
Another pause, longer this time, following which the girl came into the room at a brisk walk, accepted the flower with a "thank you," and walked back out of the room. Kytte heard her asking her mother if they had a vase.  
The girl's father, his eyebrows arched upwards, turned to Kytte and proceeded to give him a that-did-not-just-happen-did-it? look. Kytte, after shaking off his own mild shock--the girl had never, since the first time he'd delivered flowers a year ago, done anything but throw away any she received--shrugged one shoulder and donned a sympathetic look.  
"They're all bound to get interested at some time or other," he offered though he supposed his advice was moot seeing as he himself had fathered no children. "Be grateful it's taken her this long, ne?"  
Her father nodded and numbly handed the clipboard back to Kytte.  
The flower delivery guy drove his truck back down the mountain, using the route that seemed to be the safest way to sea level. On some of the bad curves he noted newly erected and sturdy-looking guardrails.  
Before his drive was half over, he had mulled over the matter and concluded that everything changes.  
By the time he got home, he'd decided that change was not, necessarily, a good thing.

* * *  
"Congratulations," Trunks said. "That's the worst lie I've ever heard."  
Through gritted teeth, Bra replied, "You know I don't lie. You know it."  
Trunks continued rooting through the refrigerator, looking for whatever would placate the appetite that always seemed to assault him around mid-afternoon on Saturdays. "Yeah, well, that's why you don't know how to make up something halfway believable, you haven't had any practice. The secret to a good lie is to make up something that could possibly happen. Time travel ending in two Gokus could not happen."  
"Monsters that split into three or four different forms and turn people into chocolate also couldn't happen," Bra retorted. "So Buu never existed."  
Trunks straightened up, banged his head on the top of the 'fridge, and swore. Then he turned around to face his younger sister, wagged his finger at her. "Buu existed, twerp."  
Bra didn't bother to take offense at that. "People can't fly, never happened. People can't shoot ki blasts because ki doesn't exist. There is no such thing as a Super Saiyajin. Fusion is a myth. Papa isn't Saiyajin because aliens aren't real."  
Trunks raised one lavender eyebrow. A slight smirk began to form on his face. Hopefully, Bra mused, it meant that he was trying to mask an expression that would say he saw her point.  
"People can't change what has been, not even to create new timelines, so there was no Mirai no Trunks. People can't come back to life. Not even with the help of the Dragonballs because the Dragonballs are magic and that isn't real either." She glared defiantly up at her brother, inwardly cursing that he towered six inches over her. "Papa told me about all of that, and he told me about this. You won't call any of that a lie--you've seen some of it happen!--so how can you say this is a lie?"  
Trunks' other eyebrow joined the already arched one for about two seconds before both dove down to aid him in a scowl. "You make good points," he admitted, "but most people wouldn't let you babble about them that long. You're lucky I'm a good listener."  
Bra drew in a deep breath and let it out with a long 'whoosh' sound. "Ask Papa if you don't believe me," she said.  
Trunks rolled his eyes, an action that seemed to be saying, 'Well, you could have just said that before you went on about Buu and flying and the Dragonballs.'  
She stalked out of the kitchen, but not before she grabbed the last cluster of grapes out of the middle bottom drawer of the 'fridge.  
Bra ignored Trunks' protests that he had been eyeing those grapes before she ever came into the room. If he'd really wanted them, she reasoned, they wouldn't have been there for her to snatch in the first place.

* * *  
As Goku's mother stalked towards him, Briefs thanked all the gods everywhere that he was already dead. He took a deep breath, considered wheeling around and heading in the opposite direction, and reconsidered when it occurred to him that such an action would be construed as running away.  
Briefs had long ago made a habit of never running away. Most of the people he wanted to run from could catch him fairly easily anyway, so it was better to appear brave.  
"Hi Kak'ri," he greeted in a somewhat shaky voice.  
"What is he doing, what part do you play in it, and why should I be pissed?" she demanded as soon as she halted. She was about a foot away, and towering over him easily, not surprising considering that she was a fair-sized Saiyajin and he was a preadolescent human boy in a wheelchair.  
"Stuff, a small one, and you're already pissed," Briefs offered in a less shaky voice, grateful now for the small reserves of sarcasm he could call upon in times of great need or when Saiyajin were mad at him.  
"You'd best be more specific before I systematically remove your toes, I hardly believe that, and yes I am," she replied. Her tail, puffed up to double its usual size, suggested that she was utterly serious despite that she usually seemed to enjoy this method of conversation.  
"It's a long story but if you must have it you will, believe it, and I know you are," Briefs retorted, wanting to cross his eyes at her but not feeling quite daring enough.  
"Tell it then, I'd believe it but it's not true, and I know you know I am."  
Briefs ended the game. "Cron is . . . tinkering . . . with Time a little bit so that he can destroy an enemy of his."  
"Why?"  
"Why what?" Saiyajin were supposed to understand the concept of revenge, weren't they?  
"Why is he bothering? He's a god, why doesn't he just kill them?"  
Briefs thought about this for a minute. It was a decent question, albeit a simple one. How typical of Kak'ri to forego tricky questions in lieu of the pointed ones, and how like a Saiyajin to ask a question like that.   
"Because there are rules and Cron follows them. Chronos is a very new office, and Cron is the first and only Chronos so far. He has to follow the rules or else Enma-sama will complain to the higher gods. There are some loopholes, and if he's subtle, then he can use them." He said this in a slow tone, one word at a time as he thought it out for himself. He glanced up at Kak'ri to see her nodding and, somewhat encouraged, continued. "Using Time to change little things is much more subtle than just going in and killing. 'Sides, he already tried to kill them. It didn't work."  
Kak'ri frowned. "'Little things'?" she protested, stepping forward. She leaned down and grabbed the armrests on either side of his chair. "'Little things'? The universe itself is groaning, and you're calling this little?"  
Briefs pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His next few words came out as squeaks. "Cron isn't--universe--what?"  
"Tell me the whole story, in detail. Now," the Esper ordered. Tendrils of black mist surrounded them, shielding them entirely from any sort of observation and removing all possible distraction. Kak'ri might have been dead, but some magics were still left for her use.  
Briefs told her the story, or what would be the story if Cron carried out the entire plan. When he was done, Kak'ri agreed with him, in that none of that could make reality shudder. She did not explain what sort of wrongness it was she felt. The only answer she gave him when he asked what she'd meant by saying that the universe groaned was that it did.   
Then she told him that his plan was stupid. He was not wounded by that remark, seeing as she'd said the same thing when she'd been told about the plan involving her youngest hitting his head on a rock.  
And then, pulling the dark mist back into herself, Kak'ri opened a Gate and stepped through it and away. Presumably, she honed in on Cron's person so she could yell at him for assuming he could put her kin through more living Hell without consulting her first.

* * *  
Of all things Bra hated, take-home exams were the worst.  
Now, some students believed that take home tests were the easiest kind, because all they had to do was open their books and search for the answers or the way to find the answers. If the students were foolish enough to start on a take-home test on the bus the morning it was due, then the blame could only be placed upon them. Teachers could rest assured in the knowledge that they could refute the angry mobs of disgruntled parents of failed students with these facts, thereby turning the tide back upon the errant students. Students could rest assured that if they truly wanted to pass a take-home test, they would.  
For all these reasons, Bra should have been happy. History was her worst subject and though she would likely have passed hadn't the test been a take-home, she only would have done so by a few points.  
However, Vegeta's daughter was one of those people who preferred to do schoolwork at school to leave the rest of her time free. Didn't matter if she'd come close to failing if given only an hour in class to finish the exam; she just didn't want to have to take time out of her weekend to finish a stupid test.  
It did not help that this test was about things that had happened hundreds of years ago. At least last year, they'd been supposed to learn about the events that had occurred over the last century or so. One of these tests had had several essay questions involving several battles for Earth and who had saved the planet; Bra had answered each with absolute truth and as a result had had thirty points taken off her score. Because, of course, it was Mr. Satan who had saved the world, not a person named Son Gohan or Son Goku. Therefore, the questions should have been easy points even though Bra hadn't been alive when the events mentioned had occurred.  
The following shouting-match with the erring teacher at the conference had been fun despite the grade--which had been a failure, since Bra had only bothered to answer the two essay questions. Undoubtedly it would have been more interesting had Vegeta come instead of Bulma--but Vegeta had only been told that there was a parent-teacher conference, not what was to be discussed there. He had not been, "at all interested in what a half-witted human thinks of my whelp."  
Bra's attention snapped back to the question at hand, which happened to be about some war that had gone on in a now-nonexistent country, and she unenthusiastically flipped through the textbook in a wearied search for the answer. After several minutes of coming up with absolutely nothing, she flipped to the Table of Contents and then the Index, finally looking up the war's name in the Glossary.  
She found the answer on page nine hundred fifty-two.  
About the time she finished writing the answer in the Space Provided, she felt a tug on the cuff of her left pant leg. She added a period onto the end of her sentence and looked down.   
Dressed in sky blue pajamas with teddy bears on them, the person Trunks had called impossible had latched onto her jeans with one hand and was diligently pulling to get her attention. Bra turned back to her test, intending to ignore him, only to find that impossible when something squeezed her leg just above her ankle.  
She looked down again to see that Carrot had wrapped his tail around her leg. With a scowl, Bra snapped, "Go away."  
"Uhn," the toddler informed her, solemnly meeting her eyes. Bra mused that 'uhn' probably meant 'No. I don't want to go away. Deal with it.'   
"I said go away, and I meant it," Bra informed him. When he kept looking at her, she sighed. "What do you want?" she asked, not really knowing if he could understand or answer. She'd never really been around a child this young before; she'd never watched anyone younger than five, and she had no younger siblings.  
"Hungwee," he said, still solemn.  
"Oh," Bra said.   
That made sense. This was the kitchen, after all.  
"Do you want me to get you something to eat?" Bra asked absently, wondering what a Saiyajin toddler could and couldn't stomach.  
She would later learn that Saiyajin toddlers were akin to goats in that they could eat anything and everything then come rushing in for dessert, but Carrot had only been at Capsule Corporation for about five or six hours, maybe a little bit longer.  
"Wes," Carrot answered. His tail squeezed one more time then left her leg to swish behind him. He gave her a look she would later come to call the 'feed me, feed me, can't you see I'm starving?' look.  
"All right," she said, pushing her chair back and standing up. She walked over to the refrigerator and began to search for something to give him. She had just about decided that applesauce would work when she looked down and saw that Carrot had somehow managed to grab and open a bottle of mayonnaise and had proceeded to dump it on himself after tasting it. The disgusted look on his face might have been funny if Bra had been in a better mood, but she wasn't and so it wasn't.  
The following yelling match between Bra and the toddler set their opinions of one another for the next four or five years. Carrot was a parasitic worm who made moments of her life Hell, and Bra was a big mean person who called Carrot 'Brussels Sprouts' and constantly informed him of how much he wasn't welcome.  
But when Carrot discovered that lima beans were Evil Incarnate, he snuck them to Bra, and she ate them without ever tattling, though she refused to eat his green beans. And when Bra broke up with her boyfriend of a year and a half, Carrot wrapped his tail around her wrist and declared her ex a "big dwerk anyway," and added, "fine a not-dwerk person."

* * *  
For the third time, Kak'ri called forth a Gate, opened it to Cron, and stepped through, not yet discouraged, for three was a lucky number. True that seven and twelve were also lucky numbers, but three came first, so this time . . .  
Kak'ri landed directly on top of Cron this time, and her right hand brushed a cold metal chain. She grasped that chain and jumped away from the god. It took her several moments of laughing at his sputtered curses then a few more moments of staring at what her hand had found to realize that three had again proven to be her number.  
In her hand, she held the means of Cron's Time travel, the object that allowed him to skip across space as well: a palm-sized, gleaming golden pocket watch.  
"Give that back!" the god howled. "I need that!"  
Kak'ri entangled the chain in her fingers then hid it behind her back. "If I were to do that, you would only run again. Are you that scared of me?"  
Cron turned slightly pink. "No, I am not scared of you," he snapped, crossing his arms and glaring. "I just don't want to hear you talk. Now give that back."  
Did he think he was lecturing a child?   
She would give it back, yes, but only after she'd driven a few things into his skull. Not necessarily figuratively.  
"We speak, first," she said, sitting in the convenient chair behind her, not concerned as to whether its presence was coincidence or she'd absently called it up.  
After a moment of further glaring, Cron did the same, as an equally convenient chair was behind him.  
And then a long table manifested itself between the two of them, stretching from one to the other. With a shrug, Kak'ri crossed her own arms, let the watch dangle from her hand. Little magic tricks did nothing to impress a person who knew stronger magics, thus Kak'ri was not impressed.  
"There is a rift," she said, "in something. I don't know what, exactly, nor do I care, but I know it's there, and I know it's not good. I will start caring if it threatens anything I am fond of." That made a short list. Kak'ri was fond of very few things, among them the spells she knew, Heaven, the concept of Hell if not the reality, her sons even though one of them didn't deserve it, possibly Bardock, her living kin, and her Queen.  
Cron stared at her for a moment, then said in a low voice, "I can handle that."  
"Good," Kak'ri said. "It's your fault."  
That was the last she would say on the subject. Cron had proven himself to be competent in the past so she would not question what he could and could not do. She would take his word for it, but nothing would help him if his word was not good.  
He did not answer her. Perhaps he thought she'd said all she had to say.   
Kak'ri narrowed her eyes and studied him, decided that yes, he knew she wasn't finished. Perhaps he simply had nothing to say to that.  
She closed her eyes, searched for a person, and sent that person a thought. ::Benaa, come here. Now.::  
Most Saiyajin would not have presumed to order their Queen about in such a manner, or indeed to do so at all. But Kak'ri had almost raised the girl and could take liberties such as this.  
The answer took a moment to come, but come it did. ::I'm yelling at my mate right now. Can it wait?::  
Kak'ri sighed inwardly. ::You spend altogether too much time in Hell, my Queen; you might try visiting Heaven once in a while. And no, it can't wait; get your ass over here, now.:: With that last thought, Kak'ri did something she rarely dared; she sent knowledge to Benaa. Not an explanation, not a string of sentences to tell her what Kak'ri had learned from Briefs, but pure, unspoiled knowledge.  
With the mental equivalent of a startled squeak, Benaa sent an unworded feeling of understanding back at her teacher. She followed this feeling with, ::I'm coming, Kak'ri-san.::  
Several seconds after Kak'ri opened her eyes, a red and black maelstrom appeared above the table. It yielded a small figure wearing loose green robes who landed feet-first on the mahogany surface and dropped into an automatic crouch. She immediately straightened out of it in order to jump off the table and pad over to Cron. As she stood in front of him with her fists on her hips, the Queen growled, then turned her back and stalked back towards Kak'ri until she stood about halfway between the two. She studied the center of the table for a second before waving at a spot beside it, where a cushioned chair popped into sudden existence. Benaa plopped into the chair, jaw set, and sent a series of five more dirty looks at the god before glancing at Kak'ri.  
::It was a heated argument you were having?:: Kak'ri asked with a half-chuckle. ::One of the ones where it seems as though you'll commit regicide?::  
::Uh-huh.:: Benaa answered, sounding much regretful for having been pulled out of it. She didn't even bother to inform Kak'ri that her mate was already dead, as was she, and so King-murder was not an option.  
She didn==t look dead. Though she usually seemed delicate and pale-skinned enough to look very sickly, a rosy color stained her cheeks and a twinkle danced in her eyes now, the always-present aftereffects to a good quarrel with her mate.  
Kak'ri almost smiled.  
But only almost.  
There was an issue to address, and it had nothing to do with King Vegeta or Benaa's rows with him.   
Kak'ri reached up to adjust her halo, then spoke. "The boy's plan won't work. Change it."  
The god's eyes widened. He opened his mouth to speak, at which point he received such a look from the Queen that he seemed unable to emit sound.  
::Bluntness is effective,:: Benaa noted telepathically, directing the thought to Kak'ri. Aloud, she said, "Exactly. Briefs is a nice boy, but that's all he is--a boy, a child. A very smart child, but a child, unable to see the basest of the errors in his logic."  
::It always worked on Raditz, bluntness,:: Kak'ri answered. ::When 'you really oughtn't touch that' had no effect, whaling the daylights out of him did.::  
::Speaking of Raditz, you really ought to visit him.::  
::He doesn't deserve to be visited.::  
::Didn't say he deserved it. Said you ought to go see him.::  
Kak'ri diplomatically ignored that--she didn't particularly want to start that up again--and waited to see what Cron would say.  
"There's nothing wrong with Briefs' plan!" he insisted, looking a bit worried at the obvious logic and careful wording Benaa had used.  
Kak'ri rolled her eyes. "There is one huge problem with the boy's plans plus a myriad of small ones."  
"And the big problem is?"  
"The boy didn't account for people."  
"Didn't account for--what do you mean?"  
"The reactions of people. The boy's plan is linear."  
Cron's eyebrows shot up, leaving him with an utterly confused expression.  
"What she means," Benaa began, "is that if any one part of that plan isn't carried out, the rest falls apart. Briefs' plan is based on what he himself would do in the situations he wishes you to create. He did not realize that he is one person and the world is filled with a million other kinds of people, most of whom would not act according to the way Briefs would in these situations."  
"In short," Kak'ri cut in, "he left no room for improvising, thus you are destined to fail."  
::His Royal Poutiness doesn't deserve to be visited either, but I still go,:: Benaa pointed out, willing to argue now that they'd given their speech. ::And if you don't visit Raditz, you don't see Bardock either.::  
::If he deserved it, I might be concerned. But he doesn't deserve it either.::  
::Just because he didn't like Kakarotto?::  
::Exactly!::  
::That's stupid.::  
Again, Kak'ri declined to answer.  
"Do you have any suggestions for Briefs' oh-so-awful plan, or were you just trying to depress me?" Cron demanded.  
"We have suggestions," Kak'ri answered, her mind wildly searching for one or two. The first and only one she came up with involved telling the god to scrap the entire idea and forget about revenge--which wasn't exactly Saiyajin-like advice, so she bit her tongue to keep from blurting it.  
"Aye," Benaa agreed. "And the first one is--"  
Kak'ri, wise to the three matters Benaa usually bothered the gods about, groaned slightly.  
"--resurrect Raditz."  
Benaa had begun pestering Enma-sama about that matter approximately five minutes after he'd sent Raditz to Hell. When Enma-sama hadn't listened to her--or obeyed any one of her direct "make Raditz alive again" orders--she'd gone to pester every other god she thought might listen to her. None had, simply because the wishes of dead Queens of equally dead--almost equally dead--species were not atop the to-do lists posted on Heaven's bulletin boards.  
Neither was the sudden manifestation of blown-up planets. Benaa's insistence that Raditz be resurrected was second only to her persistence in demanding that Vejiitasei be restored. Third to Vejiitasei and Raditz, Benaa had only a question: why couldn't her son be immortal? Really, why not?  
Cron's left eyebrow fell to its normal place, deserting its partner, which remained aloft. "I'll keep that in mind," he droned, which sounded and felt like a lie of the behemoth kind. He stood up. "Give it back," he said.  
Seeing no reason not to, Kak'ri slid the watch across the table. It skittered across the wooden surface to be caught by the god just before it would have plummeted to the floor.  
With a flash of light and a pop! Cron disappeared.  
"You're stuck on that, aren't you?" Kak'ri asked, referring to Raditz and his it's-not-going-to-happen hope of return to life.  
"Yes, I am," Benaa said. "I'm surprised you're not. He's your son."  
Kak'ri snorted.  
Over the next few years, Kak'ri and the Queen had several more of those--nonconsensual in Cron's case--conferences with the god, until finally they had a total of five plans, each one as flexible as Cron would allow it to be. They had to remind him more than once that the future he could see was only a possible one and even the gods didn't know everything.


	5. Chapter Four

Chapter Four: To Be a Happit's Chosen  
By his first birthday, Carrot firmly established himself as a member of the Briefs family--and the Son family, for that matter. Despite the fact that he neglected to fall on his head, Carrot made a very friendly baby. When asked why, Vegeta grunted a mostly unintelligible answer about hunger, lack of adult protection, and instincts that were only necessary when both factors were present.  
By his second birthday, most members of both families appeared to have forgotten Carrot was Goku's doppelganger. Perhaps the fact that he seemed convinced that everyone he knew--other than Vegeta, Trunks, Bulma, and Bra--was either his uncle or his aunt had something to do with this forgetting. He even dubbed Goku in this way. Until Carrot learned the subtle arts of pronunciation, Goku was "Unt 'Ku."  
By his third birthday, Carrot decided that Goku was "me," and for several months there was general confusion as to when he was talking about "me" himself and when he was talking about "me" the adult Goku. When asked how he'd learned that, he divulged nothing but that "Me's pictures said so." When Goku was asked about it, he grinned and said that he and Carrot talked sometimes at night when neither of them could sleep--yes, telepathically, sort of, he guessed so.  
By his fourth birthday, Carrot decided he wanted a puppy. No one, not even him, was entirely sure why he wanted a puppy, but he did. This puppy-wanting phase lasted for a week. During that week, Carrot proved that the temper tantrums Goten used to throw were nothing--nothing--compared to what his father's doppelganger could do when he really wanted something. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, it was Goten who put an end to the tantrum-throwing business.  
By his fifth birthday, Carrot started calling Vegeta "Tousan" instead of "Da-dee." Vegeta, who would never have admitted to missing being called that forever blamed Goku for the switch, seeing as that Carrot only changed his mind after one time when Goku watched him. Neither Goku nor Carrot ever told what had happened to make Carrot suddenly feel more grownup and want to act it. Carrot eventually forgot it had ever happened; Goku, however, did not.  
And on his sixth birthday, things began happening.

* * *  
Had the current cat of the family minded his stalking her, Carrot would have done it anyway and it would have been more fun. Most times when he caught her, she purred and mock-swatted at his hands, or even vaulted at his face in return. The rest of the time, when she was grumpy, she tolerated being pounced on but wouldn't participate in even the gentlest of his very careful roughhousing.  
Carrot, for one, thought it would be more interesting to pounce on a cat that didn't want to be pounced on, a cat that would hiss and scratch and bite. It wasn't that he wanted to hurt a cat, or even scare one too badly--just torment it a little bit.  
He thought that this was sort of like the way Bulma-san liked to tease Vegeta when the Prince was grumpy. And Tousan was grumpy most of the time, except for when he was tormenting someone usually named Trunks, Bulma-san, or Carrot. Sometimes he messed with Bra's head, but not very often.   
Bra had hurled a cake at Vegeta's hair last year--and she hadn't missed. A crumbly, lopsided cake it had been, with lemon-flavored yellow frosting. Tousan had been in the bathroom with the water running for two hours after that incident and had used up four bottles of shampoo. Carrot had made a mental note to never, ever say sarcastic things to Bra when she looked upset about one of her hideous baking attempts. He didn't want her force-feeding anything to his hair.  
Why she attempted to bake in the first place wasn't something she ever bothered to explain to anyone.  
The cat stopped and looked back. Carrot hissed. He could hardly stalk her if she kept stopping.  
As if with a shrug, her eyes met his. Then she started forward again, at what was a run for a cat and a good trot for a boy, and Carrot started stalking her again. All was well until the next hallway intersection, at which point Carrot either slammed into a person or that person slammed into him and both fell to the floor with an 'oof'.  
Had Goten been a particularly not-fun person to collide with in the gray hours of the morning, Carrot might have taken the next moment to jump up and start running in some direction or other. But Goten was a generally nice person to be around, except when Vegeta was trying to kill him. At those times, his immediate vicinity became very dangerous.  
The possibility that Vegeta might see him was the reason for the danger. Goten was very high up on the Prince's Kill List; in fact, Vegeta had tried harder to kill Goten in the last year than Carrot thought he'd ever tried to kill Goku. Of course, Goku had never been the sole reason for Bra's staying out all night and only showing up for dinner the next evening.  
Goten had.  
Which was why he could have done nothing more foolish than show up at Capsule Corp. at six in the morning, yawning and looking like he'd just woken up--and smelling like he hadn't exactly slept alone.  
"You really shouldn't be here," Carrot said, throwing himself to his feet and waiting for Goten to struggle to his. "If Tousan sees you, you're in trouble."  
Goten yawned.  
Certain that this was not an "Oh, I can take him" sort of yawn, Carrot persisted: "Big trouble. Huge trouble. And Goku's not here to protect you this time . . . and I think Bra might be upset if Tousan kills you."  
Carrot understood the concept of understatement, and knew that what he'd just said could be classified as such. He thought that Goten would realize this once fully awake and leave. But until then . . .  
"If Tousan does kill you, I want to watch."  
Glancing at the cat directly after done saying that, Carrot suspected that she was laughing at him. But cats couldn't really understand words or find them funny--or if they could, no one believed they could, which amounted to pretty much the same thing. Carrot scowled at her before returning to his train of thought.  
He'd never seen Tousan kill anyone before, probably because Vegeta hadn't actually killed anyone since before Carrot was brought. However, he did remember the incident last year, when Bra had come home and Vegeta had smelled Goten on her. The Prince had immediately gone roaring after Goten. That had seemed odd to Carrot because Vegeta hadn't even acted concerned before she came home: Bulma-san had been worried; Vegeta had not been. It had ended in a very exciting way.  
Goten had cowered behind Goku, who'd had to go to Super Saiyajin Level Three. Bra had screamed things at her father, some having to do with how she was twenty years old and could date whomever the Hell she wanted to, most having to do with a great many different words Carrot had never heard before and still didn't understand. Vegeta had gone to Level Two and had spent all of an hour roaring at Goku to get out of the way and trying to make the other Saiyajin move.  
It had all been very exciting, the most exciting thing Carrot has ever seen that didn't involve him.  
The most exciting thing ever to happen to him specifically had been when he'd been in the gravity room with Vegeta and it had collapsed on them. He couldn't remember much of that, probably because it had happened very fast and he'd been unconscious for about an hour afterwards, but he did remember that Bulma-san had been slightly hysterical. When he'd asked her why she was upset, she'd become more upset and went on and on about how stupid Saiyajin were and how it was all very well and fine if the thing fell on Vegeta, but it could have killed Carrot. He was foolish enough to point out that he was not actually dead and still had all of his parts, even if a few of were temporarily out-of-order. She had not taken that very well.  
Carrot had just about decided that Goten was sleepwalking when the other said, "How do you get to the front door?" He sounded sheepish, as though he didn't usually get lost when he was visiting Capsule Corp.  
Even Trunks managed to lose track of where he was sometimes, especially when it was dark. Goten almost always found himself lost and asking for directions, which made his visiting his girlfriend in the middle of the night a very bad idea, in Carrot's opinion. Also in Carrot's opinion, Bra and Goten should have eloped a long time ago. Carrot's general thoughts on even mild pecks on the lips revolved around the expression "eeeeeew!," but Bra had told him that she wanted to marry Goten and Carrot thought they should get on with it.  
Bra wouldn't be happy if Goten became lost in the bowels of Capsule Corp. to either die by starvation or bump into Vegeta. Carrot thought it would be very difficult to marry a dead person.  
After having thought about it a minute, Carrot managed to remember the way and ended up escorting Goten there because he didn't want to repeat the directions a third time. Goten was very dense in the morning.  
"Happy birthday, by the way," Goten said before he left.  
"Thanks."   
Or maybe not so dense . . . he'd never forgotten Carrot's birthday.  
After the door closed, Carrot looked around and saw the cat, whose actual name happened to be Cat--or Fluffy, depending on who was talking to or about her. With a small smirk, he said, "You."  
She turned around and, with the grace only her kind possessed, padded down the hallway. About five minutes later, Carrot became tired of following her and mock-killed her once for show, careful not to actually hurt her. Then, as he watched her go with most of her fur pushed the wrong way giving her a ruffled look, he decided to talk to Goku.  
He screwed his eyes tightly shut, sent a questioning thought in Goku's general direction, and received a Sleeping, up at eight, maybe, thought in return. It had the feel of a programmed thought, the telepathic mixture of a Do Not Disturb sign and an answering machine.  
Carrot decided to go eat breakfast. If he couldn't make that last for two hours, and he doubted he could because it was hard not to eat fast, maybe he'd go and spar with Tousan for a little while.

* * *  
Jay took off her headpiece and fiddled with the volume dial, turning it all the way up. She doubted that was the problem, knew it really couldn't be, but needed something to do with her hands. Frowning and crossing her arms, she turned around and looked through the glass. Her frown faded to a smile as she watched him, which in turn changed back to a frown when she saw how he was acting.  
His name was Mister Rex, and for good reason: he was the largest of the adult male Tyrannosaurs on the Preserve. Being a Tyrannosaur, he couldn't help but be big, but Mister Rex was huge, and ferocious, and thus demanded his own compound. If he was with the other male Rexes, they ended up being subtracted from the total number of known Tyrannosaurs in existence. This was not merely speculation but fact, for the last time Mister Rex had shared space with another of his kind and gender, they'd lost a T-Rex.  
As the species boasted ten adult males in captivity, four of them at the Preserve and only a couple more than that in the wild, it couldn't afford to lose even one individual to Mister Rex. It couldn't even afford to lose Mister Rex. It certainly couldn't afford to lose Missus Rex, who was the only female Rex here or anywhere else to have produced good, fertilized eggs in captivity. Not only that, but she'd hatched baby Rexes who were still alive three weeks after their birth.  
No one at the Preserve or anywhere else really thought that Mister Rex would hurt his Missus or their offspring. Conversely, no one wanted to take chances. Not now, not when they'd already lost most of the dinosaurs, not when they could lose the mightiest of them, and certainly not when they just might have a chance.  
So they separated them--  
And Mister Rex didn't like it--  
And Mister Rex was trampling the trees--  
All of the trees--  
And Mister Rex could actually tear down the fence if he decided to ignore the electric shock--  
And Mister Rex could also get into the Observation Center if he butted the glass with his head about ten times--  
And why isn't Pan here yet? Jay thought, glancing at her wristwatch.   
Pan should have been on maternity leave--Tyrannosaurs were a rough business, a pissed Mister Rex even more so--but she wasn't. Even though most women who interacted half as much with the animals as Pan did would have gone on leave as soon as they found out, she intended to work with them as long as she could fly. Which would, according to her, be until she went into labor and then immediately after the kid was born.  
Pan's husband, Starling the Accountant, didn't approve of this idea. At all. Jay figured that this fact probably had something to do with Pan's tardiness. Generally, she came in an hour early so she could play with the junior Rexes.   
Pan had not come in early today; as of right now, she was a quarter of an hour late.  
"Where are you, girl?" Jay murmured into the headset, not expecting an answer.  
The unanticipated reply was too loud and made her ears ring too much for her to understand anything but that she needed to turn down the volume, Right Now. She tore the headset off her head, turned the sound halfway down, then put it back on her head.  
"--and he said he's going to tell my Obaasan and--" came Pan's almost plaintive voice.  
"Start over? I didn't catch most of that."  
There was a long pause, during which Jay could hear Pan's hitched breathing, which seemed to be suggesting the possibility of tears.  
Jay had never seen nor heard Pan cry. She decided for the moment to attribute this new mood to Pan's pregnancy and the fact that expectant mothers tended to be very moody.  
"I said that I'm sorry I'm late and I'm going on leave because Starling won't leave me alone and he's going to call my Obaasan and get her to help him and she'll be on his side b'cause she's more protective than he is and I hate him and--oh, dammit, that's not true, I don't hate him, it's just that he won't even listen to me--and . . . and . . . and . . ."  
"And Rex needs you?" Jay suggested, thinking that Pan might not appreciate being interrupted and also thinking what the Hell. "Right now? We can worry about all that later, preferably once the damn dinosaur is under control. Sing 'im a lullaby or something."  
Another pause, which seemed to be helping Pan get her breathing and accompanying semi-crisis under control.  
"What's the matter with him?" Pan demanded, her voice only cracking a little bit this time.  
Jay looked at Mister Rex, who currently appeared to be eyeing the fence as he stood on ground that had formerly been covered with trees--and still was covered with trees, only now they were horizontal trees as opposed to vertical. Even from here, she could see the red, disgusting-looking veins on his eyeballs. She could almost hear his labored breaths as his flanks heaved; trampling trees was hard work, it seemed, as was total and complete rage.  
"What isn't the matter with Rex?" she answered. When Pan didn't laugh, she tacked on an addendum: "He's squashed his scenery and in a minute he'll be going for the fence."  
"Why?" Before Jay could answer, Pan added, "What did he squash, where? I can't see what you're talking about."  
Jay winced. "Eh . . . that's because you're not looking in the right place."  
"YOU MOVED HIM?!"  
"I didn't."  
"But he's moved."  
"Well . . . yes . . ."  
Yet another pause. Then, "Where is he now?" This was said in Pan's "I-am-not-going-to-lose-it" tone of voice.  
"South of Missus's pen. Look 'till you see a place that looks squashed and has a big dinosaur standing in the middle of it."  
"Uh-huh."  
Jay considered. Pissed dinosaur . . . pissed flying pregnant girl . . . no backup . . . pissed dinosaur looking at me . . . um.  
She decided not to consider anymore. She prayed that Mister Rex would determine that the Observation Center wasn't interesting at all. Then she decided not to pray anymore and settled for closing her eyes and wishing very hard.  
Jay opened her eyes about half a minute later, when Pan said, in a very chipper and very annoying voice, "Mister Rex!"  
Mister Rex immediately turned around. Then he roared. Very loudly. It wasn't his "I'm-pissed" roar; rather, it was a softer, drawn-out sound made in greeting. Jay grinned as his entire posture relaxed; she couldn't help but feel giddy when watching Pan with the dinosaurs.  
The girl had a gift, and not only with the Rexes. Last year, a couple of dragons had decided to nest in the hangar. Even though the hangar had been built by the military for a base they'd closed ten years ago, it had been decided that the dragons would have to go. After all, dragons were more vicious than dinosaurs, albeit smaller, and they weren't endangered.  
Pan had absolutely refused to let the dragons be tranquilized and moved or simply killed. Since everyone working at the Preserve considered Pan a gift from God, the dragons had stayed. Jay had seen Pan once, playing with the baby dragons with their parents watching. It almost brought tears to her eyes. No one--no one--could tame a dragon or even come close. It was impossible; they were just too wild. And there had been Pan, playing with them--not like she'd done the impossible and tamed them, but as if she'd befriended them, which if anything was more impossible.  
Then again, before she'd met Pan, Jay would have considered it impossible for anyone to fly without any sort of technology to help.   
Jay brought her binoculars up to her eyes and moved as close to the glass as possible, her eyes glazing slightly as she watched Pan and Mister Rex. She heard an audible click when Pan switched her headset off.  
Pan landed daintily on the dinosaur's head, then sat cross-legged in the center of Mister Rex's snout perhaps a foot in front of his eyes. She leaned forward as if sharing a secret with him, and the red veins in his eyes began to fade. Her very presence had calmed him quite a bit; they were good friends, he and she. Jay wished that Starling could see them; perhaps then he might understand what a precious thing this was.  
When she considered that wish, she ended up using logic to dissolve it: he might understand how precious this was, but he'd call his unborn child more precious. And he'd be right. Pan might even agree with him, but she'd never agree that she should give up the one so she could sit at home to wait for the other.  
But if Starling was going to bring Pan's grandmother into it . . . then she would have to. Jay had never met Son ChiChi, but she'd heard enough about her to know that what Pan wanted didn't really have a chance when put up against what her grandmother thought was best. Today would likely be Pan's last day among the dinosaurs until after she delivered--and this was assuming she would come back. Some mothers decided to stay at home after the baby . . .   
The Preserve would lose its gift from God for a few interminable months if not forever.  
Jay sighed, softly.

* * *  
Benaa, once upon a time Queen of Vejiitasei, currently held the opinion that Cron was either hiding something or acting idiotic, as usual. She felt herself leaning towards the former. It seemed unlikely that Cron would still be so firm in his dissent if he didn't have some withheld reason to do so.  
Though irritation made her grit her teeth and lash her tail as she paced the length of the room, wisdom told her not to interrupt. If Kak'ri and Cron wanted to squabble forever, let them!--she need not worry with it. All she needed to do was wait for them to distract each other long enough for her to do what she wanted. Not that Kak'ri needed to be distracted--had Benaa taken part in the argument, she would have been on her once-teacher's side--but Cron certainly did, the moron.  
Cron did not act like a god. Rather, he acted like a petty, out-of-place King with too many grudges to bear, too little to do about them, and a great aversion to any suggestions that didn't immediately fit into the way he thought the world worked. Had Benaa ever thought to meet the original Super Saiyajin--and she had not--she would not have pictured Cron or any entity resembling him.  
The once-Queen could not understand how the timeline had ever managed to stayed intact for a millennium with Cron at its helm. She supposed Briefs had had something to do with that.  
And an Esper is supposed to be in complete control of her thoughts always, with none of this wandering business . . .  
"YOU ARE AN IDIOT!"  
Then again, with distractions like that . . .   
"I think you're getting off-topic."  
It's really no wonder . . .  
"You! Briefs! This is not your quarrel; be quiet!"  
Actually, Kak'ri, it is, for he found her in the first place . . . and though Cron is a moron, that is only the subject and not the specific topic here . . .   
"Yes, ma'am."  
But I don't think I'll tell you so.  
"Good. Now, Cron, are you going to whine further, or shall I consider my point made?"  
No. I definitely won't . . .   
::Your thoughts are more off-topic than those two have been since they started,:: an unidentified mind-voice commented, telepathically interrupting Benaa's train of thought.  
Benaa stopped mid-step in her pacing, halted her thoughts as well, and looked at the specific topic of Kak'ri and Cron's rather fierce disagreement.  
The Happit gazed back at her.  
Somewhat irritated at the creature for interrupting her thoughts, Benaa sent this sentiment at it: ::My private thoughts are not your business. Stay out of them.::  
::Oh, but they are my business.:: The Happit sat up straighter and fluttered a wing as if for emphasis. ::And they shall remain so until I have Chosen a Charge. Until such a time, all Saiyajin thoughts I wish to listen to are my business.::  
Benaa scowled at the thing. She did not answer it, not having had a rebuttal ready and not knowing whether that was true or not. Her tail, which had stilled, began to lash again, and her scowl deepened as she studied the creature.  
The Happit did not look out of place in this room. It was an entirely black creature from the end of its tail to nose to wing tips, save for the white of its eyes and the brown of its irises, and it fit perfectly into the room's scheme of green and gold.  
::I am not an "it.":: it said. ::I am a "she."::  
::And my private thoughts have never been meant for you.:: Benaa retorted, nonetheless unable to mentally refer to the Happit as "it" when she went back to observing her.  
She had never seen a member of this species before, although she had heard of them. What she'd heard had been for the most part very bad, namely because she had gleamed most of her information from Cron. Only the little that Briefs had been willing to tell had let her know the species was not and never had been entirely corrupt.  
Small. Very small. Benaa doubted that the Happit would reach her knee once full grown, if she wasn't already at adult size. Despite the matter of the creature's size--and also despite the silken, curly fur that covered the Happit and the little stub of her tail--the Happit sat with a confident air that only royalty or those wielding enormous power had. The Happit did not feel quite like royalty, but she seemed close. Few would have felt at all self-assured with the God of Time bellowing that in his opinion they should either be killed or shipped off to a distant time; Benaa was surprise the Happit looked a quarter so self-possessed as she did.  
::I am not interested in your private thoughts, but they are better than the others in this room,:: the Happit said in a continuation of their conversation after a few minute's lull. The room seemed very quiet, likely because Kak'ri and Cron were no longer speaking aloud and were probably now conversing in a private line of thought just as Benaa and the Happit were doing. ::Regardless of how . . . concerned . . . I should likely be, they have been arguing the same few points for an hour and a half. If something does not happen soon, I shall take a nap. Perhaps you ought to begin thinking again of what can be accomplished while the fussy god is distracted.::  
Benaa almost snapped back at her--she could dictate her own thoughts, thanks--but instead held her temper and said, ::If you're going to listen anyway--::  
::I am.::  
::--then I shall just have to think at you rather than be spied upon.::  
::All right.:: the Happit winked, an action that seemed out of place with the generally prissy mood.  
::If Cron has his way, you'll never see Chikyuu or meet Carrot. If Kak'ri has her way, and she usually does, then you will, but we'll probably end up waiting here for upwards of three more hours.:: Benaa paused, then said, ::Any questions yet?::  
::Three. What is Chikyuu, who is Carrot, and why would we wait for them to finish when I never gave them leave to argue about my fate to begin with?:  
The first two of these gave Benaa pause. How to explain that planet? How to explain Carrot? ::And if you've been in my head, why don't you know that already?:: She recalled that there had been a third question, and added, ::We wouldn't and probably won't.::  
::Unless you regularly mull over the facts you take for granted, there is no reason I should know. I do not poke around in people's minds; all I do is listen to their present thoughts.::  
::Hmm.::  
::'Hmm'?::  
::Yes. 'Hmm'.::

* * *  
Cron was so caught up in his disagreement with Kak'ri, which had since changed to a telepathic channel so that they could make their points more efficiently, that he neglected to notice when Benaa strode up to the Happit, picked her up, and stepped through a Gate aimed at Chikyuu. This was because the god did not expect her to do this; she was not supposed to do this; she had never done this before. Dead people were supposed to obtain clearance before they went gallivanting around the Mortal World. Even so, it was a difficult task to stop a capable, never-damned soul from going wherever it wanted to. After all, anyone who belonged in Heaven would never so openly defy the rules . . . and if they would, they weren't likely to do anything very major or even halfway questionable . . . right?  
Kak'ri, however, did notice when Benaa went. She had a time keeping herself from smirking until Cron realized the Happit was gone, Benaa was gone, and the exact thing he hadn't wanted to happen had gone and happened anyway.  
Briefs also noticed Benaa go, though he saw her through bleared eyes. He'd been half-asleep at the point when he'd told Kak'ri she was off-topic, and that had been his last attempt to bring some sort of attention to himself. After that he'd been concentrating on staying somewhat awake until the issue was resolved.  
No one ever told him that the dead did not necessarily have to eat, or sleep, or go about other fleshly business; thus, he kept on doing so, just as he had when living. Had he only known, he'd have understood why Enma-sama had never, not even once, tried to convince him to be anywhere--like Heaven, which was where he'd been marked for over a thousand years ago--but where Cron could find him when needed.

* * *  
The Sleeping, up at eight, maybe notice was still tacked up on Goku's mind at eight-thirty. By that time, Carrot had earned a good number of new bruises in a spar with Tousan. He had also eaten--a lot--taken a bubble bath, and watched the golf channel on satellite in an attempt to make like his double and fall asleep.  
Now he was looking for Cat so he could stalk her some more.  
It was his birthday, but they never celebrated it until afternoon--and the only other person awake was Vegeta, who was in a nasty mood this morning and would probably put Carrot in the hospital were they to spar again. Carrot needed something to do until someone else woke up, and stalking the cat was all he could think of right now.  
As of yet he had not found her, and he had been looking for all of ten minutes. He was getting bored, very bored, and had considered blowing a hole in the wall just to see if Bulma-san's security robots were working again. This idea was vetoed when the sensible part of him informed the other parts of him that the reason Bulma-san's robots weren't working in the first place was that Tousan had had to come and rescue him the last time he had tried that experiment.   
Vegeta had no qualms about making work for his mate and had probably been very pleased to have plausible reason to do so. Bulma-san, however, had not been pleased and had told Carrot that, if there ever came a next time, she would program the repaired robots to come and kill him in his sleep. Carrot didn't think she'd meant that, but that sensible part of him thought it was better not to contend with certain people's tempers.  
Carrot's thoughts might have grown darker and much sulkier if something small and soft had not fallen out of thin air and landed on his head just when he was starting to feel almost sorry for himself.  
"Oops," a voice Carrot didn't recognize said.  
The small, soft . . . whatever . . . bounded to the floor, spreading its wings to steady itself. Carrot's attention did not remain on it long enough for him to get a closer look. Rather than watching it, his eyes latched onto the person who had suddenly appeared by his side.  
This person was transparent; Carrot could see through her to the wall. She had a tail--a tail like his own, which now that he'd remembered it unfurled from his waist and began to swish--and was tiny for a grownup, standing two inches shorter than Vegeta and more delicately built than him, too. Though it may just have been her transparency, her skin was very pale. Her hair was dark and reached down to her shoulders in short, controlled spikes.  
Carrot knew what Saiyajin looked like.  
He also knew that people who weren't alive anymore wore halos above their heads, because that was in all the stories Goku told about when he was dead. And Goku told those stories often, because Carrot asked for them often.  
Just as he'd taken all of this fully in, she seemed to realize that he saw her. She looked at him, he looked at her and then he blinked and she was gone with another, this time barely audible, "oops."  
::I fail to believe that was not contrived,:: a voice muttered inside of Carrot's head, much like Goku often did. Only Goku didn't talk like that and this voice sounded different anyway, less open and much lower.  
Something inside, a kind of seventh sense, told Carrot that it was the thing that had fallen on his head that had spoken. He turned his head and looked at it. His eyes widened.  
::Firstly, I am not an "it." I am a "she." Secondly, I am not a "whatever." I am a Happit. Thirdly, I am not a puppy, so stop thinking it.::  
"What's a Happit?" Carrot asked, trying his best not to think 'puppy' even though the Happit looked exactly like a little cocker spaniel if he ignored her wings.  
He was no longer bored. True that he was now very confused, but being bored was worse.  
The Happit tilted her head to the side, said, ::A Happit is magic incarnate, or close enough. Beyond that, we are--or were, long ago--guardians and companions of a sort.::  
"Guardians and companions of what?" Carrot crouched down to study the not-puppy, his tail sweeping in long strokes behind him.  
::Saiyajin.::  
"Oh. Okay." He considered. "So you've come to be my guardian and companion?"  
Well, it was his birthday, after all . . . he hoped that question hadn't made her mad. When her mind spoke to him, she sounded like the kind of person who took offense easily.  
::That is what others have intended for me, yes.::  
"Does that mean you haven't?" he asked, feeling very disappointed and also unsure of why he felt that bad about it when he wasn't sure what she meant. "I mean, I can protect myself pretty good and all, but I wouldn't mind--" He was going to say "having a friend," but he wasn't himself very sure why that was what he'd been going to say, so he stopped, uncertain.  
::Whether I have or haven't depends on . . . many factors. I am not quite certain, but I believe that the Choosing is not quite as voluntary for either party as it might sound.::  
"Huh?"  
::I do not think it is my choice or yours. I think that my instincts or something deeper than my instincts will Choose for me.::  
"Oh. Okay," Carrot said. He wondered what she meant by 'Choosing.'  
::You know less of your people's history than I do of Heaven, if you do not know even that,:: the Happit mused, and Carrot didn't even wonder why it seemed like she was reading his mind. ::But that is hardly any fault of yours.:: She paused for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts together, then said, ::At a time now a thousand years past, there were Saiyajin and there were Happits. The one came to the other and upon consideration they made a pact: where ever a Saiyajin dwelled, there would also dwell a Happit, and together they would be stronger and more whole than before.  
::This pact required that every Happit should Choose a Saiyajin he or she could get along with, then remain near that Saiyajin to defend and be defended until their minds could no longer meet. Great powers that no planet but this has ever seen and even Earth will never see again came together. In a day and a night, the magic was created; in another day and another night, it was set into place.  
::These events occurred in the age of the True Telepath. Every third Saiyajin in those days well knew the arts of the mind, thus some of them could accomplish what has now been impossible for centuries.  
::For a hundred years, all was as well and peaceful as possible when Saiyajin are involved.  
::Then it ended. How it ended is not pertinent--its condensed form is overlong when compared to the full story of how Saiyajin and Happit met--but know that it did end, O thou son of Saiyajin. It may not be possible to begin it again. But then, the Telepaths of days past were competent and meant for the ties to last forever.::  
Carrot, who had during the course of the story settled down to sit cross-legged, took a minute to come out of the daze the tale had invoked in him. When he did, it occurred to him that he had finally met a better storyteller than Tousan, who usually relied on expletives and sound effects to make a story interesting.  
"Oh. Okay," he said, again repeating his usual response to any explanation whether he understood it or not.  
::You did not grasp a half of that,:: the Happit accused.  
Feeling sheepish and as transparent as the ghost he'd seen, Carrot ducked his head. "Not really . . ."  
::It does not matter. Perhaps I will repeat it for you one day when you will understand it. As for now, all you need to understand is the concept of near-permanent mind-linkage.::  
"Uh. What's that?"  
::It is--:: The Happit's eyes narrowed and her muzzle twitched. ::Erm. The concept of mind-linkage is a difficult one. Not impossible to teach, but difficult nonetheless. It would be simpler to demonstrate . . . if I may?::  
"Sure," Carrot said without the slightest clue of what the Happit wanted to do.  
::You might think of me by my name. I do have one,:: the Happit said, temporarily abandoning the topic of conversation. ::It is Lady. I would suggest you not think of puppies again--and there you go. Ignoramus.::  
"It's not my fault you look like a puppy and have a dog name," Carrot said, grinning at the flash of irritation he felt from the Happit's mind. "Don't blame me for thinking about it. Bulma-san says I'm con-tra--" He frowned. "Contra--"  
::Contradictory?:: the Happit--Lady--said.  
"Yeah, that's it."  
::Well, cease being contradictory for the few minutes this will take,:: she suggested amiably, though with an underlying tone suggesting Carrot did not dare be anything other than compliant for the next few minutes.  
"Okay," Carrot said.  
::Now close your eyes.::  
"Why?"  
::Because I told you to.::  
Sensing that somehow she didn't appreciate being asked questions either, Carrot closed his eyes.  
::Do not speak aloud. Speak with your mind; otherwise, this will be more difficult.::  
Carrot opened his mouth, checked himself, closed his mouth, and thought, ::Okay.::  
For a short while, neither Lady nor Carrot spoke. Nothing seemed to have been delayed, for Carrot could feel . . . things . . . going on inside his mind, things he was not doing himself. Old memories came back to him, some of them memories he had forgotten, some of them memories that had before been slurred but now became sharp.  
(Trunks, holding a box of granola bars out of his reach. "They're mine, and you aren't getting them 'till I'm done.")  
(Bra, sitting with her face an inch from the computer screen, her fingers moving swiftly around and about the keyboard. "No, I haven't programmed a game for this yet. Yes, I'll get around to it once the kinks are out of the system. Scram, Brussels Sprouts.")  
(Tousan, glaring down at him when he finally woke up. "See, woman, he's not dead.")  
(Bulma-san, standing in front of him with her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. "Is there a reason you flooded the hallway?")  
(Goku, sitting at a table filled with plates of food, somehow managing to stop stuffing his face long enough to talk coherently. "Hey, Carrot, you want some? Come sit down.")  
(ChiChi-san, glancing over her shoulder then turning him around to hand him a dishtowel and a plate. "If you're going to be standing there, you can help.")  
(Vegeta again, much younger than now, his face becoming a startled, almost panicked scowl. "I am not your 'Da-dee!'")  
(And the oldest, first forgotten memory of all. Someone looming above him, not touching him like he had been a minute ago but singing a lilting tune in a gruff voice, only pausing long enough to yell at someone Carrot--called only Kakarotto, then--couldn't see. "You shut up. It's tradition--if you say another word about it, I'll sing all fifty stanzas instead of just the one.")  
All of these scenes and more shot through Carrot's mind within a few minutes; his life--or at least the important parts of it--literally flashed before his closed eyes. He wondered what, exactly, Lady was doing.  
::I am looking for something,:: she said, sounding muffled. ::It really should be here, somewhere--ah-ha!::  
::What?::  
::Here, I will show it to you.::  
Carrot waited, studying the inside of his eyelids. About half a minute after Lady spoke, he felt something in the back of his mind. He had to contemplate it for awhile before he realized what it was.  
It was an empty spot, a void of space hidden inside his mind.  
Wondering what exactly an empty spot in his head said about him, Carrot asked, ::Where'd that come from?::  
::That has always been here and will always be here unless you are mind-linked to another via this particular part of your mind,:: Lady said. ::There are many, many of these in your mind, as is natural for Saiyajin. Most or all of them will never be filled and some of them cannot be, but they are there.::  
::Oh. Okay.:: He thought about this for a moment. ::How do they get . . . filled . . . if they do?::  
::One moment, and I shall show you that.:: Lady paused then went on. ::While Saiyajin posses numerous voids like this one, no Happit has ever had more than one. That one can only be filled once, and if the link is somehow rent, the void closes and we are forever alone inside our minds.::  
::That sounds depressing.::  
::Does it? Well, it has never seemed all that depressing to me. If I were Saiyajin, I would be more concerned with the many voids inside of me than I would be about the single one inside a member of another species,:: Lady snipped. Before Carrot could retort with something either very scathing or very inarticulate, she said, ::No Happit has filled that void for over a thousand years.::  
::I still don't understand what you mean by--::  
::I am going to show you now.::  
::Okay,:: Carrot said, feeling like he'd said that a lot today.  
He felt something else in his mind then, a presence of sorts that did not usually belong there. This presence drifted towards the void Lady had shown him, and he decided it must be her.  
The presence came towards the space, squeezed into it, and the void was gone. Instead, there was that presence, only now it was more vivid than before. Before he quite realized what was happening, Carrot was feeling Lady's thoughts the way she had been feeling his.  
Lady thought . . . that he was a very interesting child. She also thought . . . that she was being foolish even talking to a Saiyajin; Carrot couldn't quite feel why she thought that, but she did. Furthermore, she thought . . . that if he didn't stop eavesdropping, she would do something painful to him, and just because she'd opened her mind to him like this didn't mean he had to take advantage.  
Carrot didn't quite understand why she thought she could eavesdrop on him but had to have her privacy, but he decided not to worry about it.  
::This is what is called mind-linkage. Were we to stay linked for a good amount of time, we would fade into each other's minds, always there but overlooked unless danger came to the other or the link was broken. Were this the particular void the Telepaths of olden days created, we would not be able to severe the link save under extreme magical pressure or death. As this is not that particular void, we can separate our minds, like this.::  
The presence in the void began to pull away--and then, a moment after it had, it snapped back, and both Lady and Carrot almost screamed. When even that small part of that void became empty again, Carrot felt pain, sharp and biting something deep inside him; it felt like when someone pulled his tail, only worse. As if his mind were his tail and someone was crushing it into paste . . .  
::Erm.::  
::What happened?:: Carrot demanded, hissing at the dull but nevertheless painful throb in the back of his head.  
::Erm,:: Lady repeated. ::I think . . . erm. When I said that this void was not the one I would have to look for if I were to Choose you, I may have been mistaken.::  
Carrot did not say "Oh. Okay" this time, but he did understand what she meant. He thought for a second, then said, ::'Oops,' right?::  
::Oops . . .:: Lady echoed, and her 'oops' sounded more sincere than the ghost's 'oops' had.  
Carrot opened his eyes then, somehow knowing that he was now allowed to. Lady looked at him from where she sat, and he looked at her. After a while, he stood and picked her up, surprised that she let him.  
They ran into Vegeta on the way outside. When Tousan saw Lady, his eyes widened then narrowed, and Carrot saw something so dangerous in them that for the first time ever, he was really scared of him. Carrot didn't understand the fleeting thought from Lady that came then (Oh gods, he was there, he knows, he must know, oh I knew this was a mistake . . .), and he didn't ask her even after Vegeta pushed past them without a word. He had an idea that it was safer, for now, not to ask . . . and besides, he somehow had the feeling that Lady might tell him that it was not her story to recount.

* * *  
Elsewhere, Hell in fact, a Saiyajin with long, long hair was brooding.  
He would have been in a great deal of pain, which would have left him nothing for brooding with. However, years ago, someone in bureaucracy had decided that since the normal Hell didn't seem to be working, the Saiyajin might as well be shipped off to the most out-of-way Hell so that there would be room for the people who might just possibly repent.  
If Raditz had been told what he was supposed to repent of, he might have considered it. Benaa had tried to explain it once and hadn't done very well; Raditz had never understood her anyway, so that had not surprised him.  
Raditz was so busy thinking about how stupid this was--which was getting to be an old topic, seeing as he'd brooded about that on and off ever since he'd gotten here, which had been who-knew how long ago--that he didn't even notice who was behind him until she spoke.  
"I never gave you permission to fill out this much," his mother commented.  
His thoughts froze as he turned around, and they faded away as his eyes confirmed what his ears had heard. "O . . . Okaasan! What are you doing here?"  
For the person who stood there was indeed his okaasan. Though she seemed a bit shorter than he remembered, she was otherwise just the same, her hair almost as long as his and just as wild, reaching to her waist. She wore a long robe reminiscent of the robes she had worn when alive, and its color was that of newly shed blood; that, along with the look on her sharp-featured face, gave her a very dangerous air.  
Raditz had no idea what he'd done, but despite that he hadn't seen her since twenty-some years before his own death, he knew what she looked like when he was in trouble.  
"Taking Benaa's advice. Why, I don't know," she said. "You got big."  
Thinking that anyone would think that she hadn't seen him since he was a toddler, Raditz grunted. He was wise enough not to comment.  
"To get down to business," Kak'ri said, "there is a reason I am here." Her glare deepened. "You are going to explain your behavior on Chikyuu."  
At this point, Raditz remembered what one of his more depressing dying thoughts had been: Okaasan is going to kill me. At the time, he hadn't really been concerned with the fact that he'd never really thought about whether he'd ever see her again; it had also not occurred to him that, since he was already dying, she couldn't kill him even if he would see her.  
"You are going to explain it now," Kak'ri clarified.  
The problem with this was that Raditz couldn't explain it. He didn't know how to explain it; it had been a long time since he'd been ordered to give a good reason for something to Okaasan.  
Besides, he regretted that now, had in fact regretted it since about the time it occurred to him that He Was Dead, and wasn't that enough?  
Apparently not, by the look on her face.  
Raditz took a deep breath. Then he opened his mouth and willed words to exit it. And come they did. "I was having a bad day?"  
Kak'ri was not amused. "That's a question, not an answer. If you'd managed to make it sound like one, it would not have been an acceptable answer." She frowned. "You can do better than that. And until you do, I shall not support Benaa in her whining."  
So saying, Kak'ri waved a hand at the air beside her and stepped into the Gate that materialized there, giving Raditz no time to come up with something better.  
"Support Benaa in whining about what?" Raditz shouted as the Gate dissipated. "You're confusing me, dammit!"  
It took a minute for it to occur to him that Kak'ri had used a Gate.  
He hadn't known it was possible to do that when dead . . . it had just never occurred to him to wonder.  
Every time Benaa visited him, she used a Gate. He had never really thought about it before, or if he had, he'd dismissed it as just another impossibility Benaa had refused to treat as such, on par with the time when Benaa had sworn to defeat King Vegeta in a duel, her magic against his ki. Despite the naysayers, of which Raditz had been one, Benaa did what she had sworn to, and afterwards gave no further objection to the betrothal that had been fabricated before her birth.  
He wondered if he could use a Gate.   
Granted, Benaa and Okaasan weren't damned, and Raditz was. After considering that, he decided it probably didn't make a difference; in life, abilities had not been delegated according to what kind of a person someone was. Why should it be any different in the Afterlife?  
Raditz closed his eyes hard and concentrated. He searched for Benaa with his mind, and slowly the image of a room came to him, a small room with several chairs in the center and filled bookshelves on three-and-a-half walls. In one of the chairs Benaa sat reading, her legs curled up, her tail swishing over an armrest, and her chin in her hand.  
The largest difference between Saiyajin Espers and Saiyajin Warriors, other than that Espers fought with magic and Warriors fought with ki, was that Espers were far more literary. Raditz had never met an Esper who was averse to books. In fact, though he himself was only half Esper, he had missed books after Vejiitasei, and by consequence his mother's library, had been destroyed.  
He shook his head, not hard enough to shove the image out of his mind but hard enough to stop his thoughts from wandering, and remembered how to call his Gate.  
::Come,:: he ordered it, and it came, its colors, as they had always been, a merry green and red.  
Raditz stepped through his Gate and out of Hell and landed in the chair opposite Benaa's. It would have taken her a while to notice his presence, but he stank of sulfur, and--  
"What is that sme--Raditz? What the Hell are you doing out of Hell?"  
"Interesting wording there."  
She ignored the jibe. "You still have your halo, so you can't be alive . . . I'll still have to work on that, then . . . how did you get out?"  
"Used a Gate."  
"You what?" Benaa demanded, "You used a what? You mean . . . all these years . . . you could have gotten out anytime you wanted to?"


	6. Chapter Five

Chapter Five: Hell to Pay (Or Maybe Not)  
"I probably could have," Raditz answered, "only I didn't realize it."  
Benaa turned down the corner of the page she was on and closed the book. She set it on the coffee table by her chair and leveled a scornful glare at him. "And this knowledge escaped you how?"  
Raditz shrugged and leaned back in the chair, crossed his arms. "Doubtless the same way it escaped you."  
I doubt it. I never needed to know. I'm trying to get you resurrected, not just out of Hell so you can bother me.  
Had she entertained the slightest notion that he might pay attention, she would have voiced that thought. She also would have pointed out, as an example, how she had never been off-planet before her death, while Raditz had. He'd dealt with the issue of genocide, and rather badly, resulting in his damnation. Though Benaa might have made the same faux pas had she been placed in a similar situation, she could hardly have been damned to Hell for what she might have done if. Therefore, Raditz had no right to suggest that she could be partially blamed for his time in Hell; their positions were definitively different from each other's.  
"You stink," she informed him instead, and her tail curled around her waist.  
At that moment, Benaa began to realize what Hell had done to Raditz, at least in the physical sense. She'd never noticed it before, probably because the surroundings had been too bad for her to see how terrible Raditz looked. Seeing him in Hell was quite a bit different from seeing him in the middle of her nice, clean study.   
He'd lost no weight since his death; to age in the Afterlife required conscious thought, and Raditz rarely thought about aging at all. However, stinking did not, and if a person was damned to Hell for any period of time, that person stank and looked dirty. With mats in his once-magnificent hair and foulness caked to what Benaa could see, Raditz did look dirty--and not only dirty, but filthy.  
"You stink," she repeated, "and you look awful. Take a shower, 'Ditz."  
He ignored her as he had always ignored her advice in life. No doubt she'd have to say it thrice more and explain the exact reasons why before he would even appear to consider it.  
Instead of continuing to sit and blatantly ignore her, Raditz stood up and moved over to the bookshelves. He picked up a title, studied it for a minute, then put it back. "What's a compass, and why do I care if it's golden?"  
"I have encyclopedias," she said, gesturing towards the five sets of them, which took up three shelves. "Look it up then read the book."  
"Do I care?" he asked, picking up another book, which Benaa recognized as the immediate sequel to the book he'd just put away. "Would I think it's worth it?"  
Benaa considered. "I doubt it."  
"What do I care about, then?" he asked, returning The Subtle Knife to the shelf.  
Raditz had never minded books with plot, Benaa recalled, but he generally wanted some kind of action in them. Blood and gore, sex--or both--seemed to work for him regardless of plot. They sometimes worked for Benaa, too, when she felt depressed.   
She had a bookshelf designated for those kinds of books, and she looked over at it now.  
Her eyes caught several titles, and she said, "Maybe American Psycho; it's good and gory, pretty plotless. You'd like it. Either that or Valley of Horses, which does actually have semblance of plot but makes up for it with plenty of pointless orgies."  
There must have been something in her tone; for when Raditz turned around and looked at her, he was frowning. It was his wounded frown. "Where do you get these?"  
Benaa assumed he meant her book collection in general. "Cron. He gets me books, I stop pestering him for awhile." It might not be wise to mention that Raditz's resurrection was what she usually pestered the god about. She didn't think Raditz would understand. Though he'd assured her that he didn't want to hear about it, she doubted he wouldn't throw a fit if he knew she might have already had him back alive but for Cron's bribes. Benaa wondered why she'd told him anyway, since he never purported to believe she could do something unless she'd already done it.  
Trying not to give him enough time to infer this, Benaa said, "As for where he gets them from, most of the books here weren't written in our timeline. Cron got most of them from a very obscure timeline no one looks at very much."  
Raditz blinked. Then, instead of asking any of the questions Benaa had expected, he asked, "Where are we?"  
"Not Heaven," Benaa said. "You couldn't get in there."  
Raditz snorted.  
Before he could say he knew that already, she added, "You're not in Hell either," and pretended not to hear his first snort or the one that followed it. "We're in Purgatory."   
At this point, Raditz's eyebrows drew together in a suitably confused expression; Benaa smirked at him before continuing.  
"Purgatory is in-between Heaven and Hell. A long time ago, a controversy started about whether someone who died and went to Hell should be sent to Heaven if they would have redeemed themselves within a year or two. The reverse was argued about as well: if a person went to Heaven but would have been damned had they lived a little bit longer, where should that person go? Until The Powers That Be decided what the regulation regarding that should be, these people needed to go somewhere, so one of the Powers created Purgatory and stuck them there.  
"They finally decided that what people haven't done yet should have no bearing on whether they go to Heaven or Hell. Took the morons five hundred years, if you listen to Cron . . . idiots." Benaa shook her head. "A few years ago, when they made the final decision and sent the people where they should have been all along, Purgatory became vacant. No one knew what to do with it, so Kak'ri-san and I took possession. We dragged Briefs and Cron with us. Enma-sama doesn't want us back in his house, so they haven't tried to make us leave."  
Raditz blinked again. "All right . . ." he said. He seemed to be thinking about something, and then he blurted, "So why wasn't I ever in Purgatory?"  
"Because you wouldn't have gone to Heaven anyway; you wouldn't have changed. Purgatory was for those who would have changed had they had a chance to. Thought I made that clear." Suddenly realizing why he may have asked, she said, "The house wasn't here then; Purgatory was not a nice place to be. Think never-ending fog and the feeling that you're falling . . . but you keep on falling even after the point when you should shudder and wake up. Purgatory wasn't nice then, Raditz, and it was never meant to be. Everyone here was either headed for Hell or would have gone there if they'd lived longer."  
Raditz nodded and went back to reading book bindings and occasionally picking up a book to flip through its pages. He ignored the entire shelf upon which American Psycho and Valley of Horses sat. Once he'd gone around the room, he floated up to look at the books on the top few shelves and promptly discovered the box Benaa kept on the topmost shelf near the door.  
"Don't touch that!" Benaa yelped--in vain, it seemed, for Raditz had opened it by the time she got to 'that.' "All right then, don't eat any of it," she said. "I don't want you drunk."  
"One piece won't make me drunk," Raditz informed her, taking a piece of chocolate out of the box and holding it between his forefinger and his thumb.  
"This is the Afterlife; things are more subjective here," Benaa said through gritted teeth. "I'm the kind of person who could eat a box-full without feeling it, and you're the kind of person who would get one taste then start stumbling into things." As an afterthought she added, "Damn it."  
The look Raditz gave her spoke so clearly that he didn't have to say anything: "Fine. You're wrong, but I don't want to deal with it." And he put it back, slamming the box's lid. He studied his fingers for a few seconds as if expecting to see chocolate staining them although it had been wrapped in plastic.  
"That's it." Benaa stood and floated off the floor, over to Raditz. When her nose and his were an inch apart, she said, "You don't want to read my books. I don==t want you eating my chocolate. There is nothing for you to do here. Since this is so, you are going to take a bath. Right now."  
"All right," Raditz agreed, causing Benaa to lose a bit of composure; she'd expected him to argue.  
"And you're going to get rid of that armor," Benaa said once over the shock of being agreed with, "and you're going to wear a robe or something."  
"I will not!" he protested, as offended as Benaa had expected he might be.  
"You will."  
"I won't!"  
"Why not? I wouldn't go on wearing what I died in."  
"I'm not you."  
"I know you're not."  
"Then stop pestering me!"  
"No. I can't see what's so wonderful about wearing armor anyway, far less the bloody tatters hanging off of you."  
"It's better than robes."  
Benaa crossed her arms and floated to the floor. "There's nothing wrong with robes; you wore them until years after you came of age. The first time you ever wore armor--"  
"I know when I first wore armor."  
"Then you'll recall that my mate almost had to knock you over the head before you'd put it on. And now you won't take it off . . . 'Ditz, you are a moron."  
Having said this with all the force she could gather, Benaa glared at him until he floated down, at which point she levitated off the floor again, this time less than a foot and a half. She snatched his halo from where it bobbed above his head.  
"Give that back!" Raditz snarled.  
At this point, the absurdity of the situation became clear to Benaa. Here was Raditz, who'd been in Hell for a very, very long time, disputing with her about whether or not he should take a bath. A bath and what he would and wouldn't wear after he took it . . . such little things when measured against some of what they'd argued about in life.  
Hell had not broken Raditz.  
Benaa had never really thought it had or would, but it was nice to have proof.  
So she smiled as she held his halo behind her back and out of his reach. "No. You really shouldn't have it, anyway. Damned people usually don't. It's just that some people were Dream Walking though the Afterlife a few years back and Enma-sama ordered halos to the damned so that there wouldn't be any confusion about who was dead and who was Walking. There have been mistakes made before; Dream Walkers aren't supposed to go into the Hells, and when they do, they're supposed to have a glow about them that tells what they are. Sometimes, though, they don't have that glow for whatever reason and can be mistaken as belonging in the Hell they're in. Enma-sama ordered most of the halos back again afterwards, but our people's Hell is easy to overlook, so he hasn't gotten around to them yet."  
"Your point?"  
"I'm not giving it back until you take a bath and dress in something clean. As Cron is not likely to contribute to your wardrobe and Briefs is nowhere near your size and we have all sizes and colors of robes in a closet somewhere . . . well, you're going to have to wear one. Deal with it."  
Raditz scowled. "I don't need a halo," he said. "Keep it."  
"Yes, you do," Benaa dissented. "If you don't have one, Enma-sama will notice. He'll wonder if you're a living person. He'll check. And then he'll send you straight back to Hell. If you do have one, he's not as likely to notice you."  
She neglected to mention that Enma-sama stayed as far away from Purgatory as possible in an attempt to keep space between himself and the resident lack of sanity there. She also neglected to feel more than a tiny bit ashamed of herself for the way the color drained from Raditz's face at the words 'straight back to Hell.' Blackmail was never nice. Benaa herself had never been nice.  
"Fine," Raditz said in a low, cold tone of voice. "Fine."  
"Good," Benaa said, feeling a bit worried when Raditz turned around and walked out the door without bothering to slam it behind him.  
Before the door could swing closed, Raditz walked back in. "Where's the shower?"

* * *  
Back on Earth, a little girl and her father sped along at an even five miles per hour above the posted speed limit. They were headed to a birthday party, and a wrapped present lay in the girl's lap.  
The girl herself was looking out the window at the passing buildings. She wasn't really paying attention to them; rather, she was wondering if it was okay to hate Mama. Daddy had said it was okay to still love her, but he hadn't said whether it was okay to hate her or not--and Dee was afraid to ask, not least because he seemed to expect her to love Mama and miss her still.  
Well, she didn't miss her, and she sure didn't love her. At all. Not even the slightest bit. And maybe she would go to Hell for thinking so because hating had to be worse than dropping a plate on the floor or leaving her homework on the dining room table or even pretending not to hear when Mama called her in from playing with her friends. But she didn't care about that right now, couldn't care about that right now, because then she'd cry. She hadn't cried for a long, long time, and if she cried now, she wouldn't be able to stop crying, and Daddy would worry more than he already did, and he already worried way too much.  
Just then, the car made a loud noise and shuddered.   
Dee giggled, momentarily distracted from thoughts too dark for any five-year-old, no matter how old her eyes. "Daddy?" she said.  
Daddy glanced over at her. "Yes, hon?"  
He always called her that, was the only person who had ever called her that. No one else had ever even called her "honey." Dee loved her pet name just because of that.  
"You should get another car," she said.  
"Say whaaaaat?" he demanded in mock-outrage. "I love this car!"  
"No you don't," a cynical voice remarked from behind. "It's just that if you get a new one, you'll total it when you decide to see 'what she can do.' This clunker is the only car in the world you've driven without trying something stupid."  
Privately, Dee agreed. Daddy's car was a clunker. It made all sorts of weird sounds when he drove it, and it was all banged up on the outside. The inside was almost worse: the seats didn't have much stuffing in them anymore, and neither the radio nor the air conditioner had worked since Dee could remember. Which was okay, because Daddy usually drove her in the Wagon, but it was in the shop this week because he'd finally decided to see what it could do.  
"It's a classic, not a clunker," he insisted. "You don't know what you're talking about."  
Puar snickered. Dee snickered too. Daddy shook his head and muttered things under his breath.  
And for awhile, Dee wasn't thinking about Mama anymore--then she looked down and saw the cast on her arm, and she couldn't stop herself from thinking about her.  
She wasn't entirely sure why she didn't love Mama--she thought there might be a lot of reasons--or even if she ever had. All she knew was that she didn't and couldn't remember a time when she had.  
There had never been any question about loving Daddy. As far back as she could remember, he'd come to get her every Friday night at six then taken her back every Sunday evening at the same time. He'd probably done that since even before she could remember, maybe even since she'd been born. Mama thought Daddy was stupid and had said so a lot. She probably still thought so, but it didn't matter anymore, at least not to Dee.  
"If you ever come near my daughter again, or even try, I will kill you," that was what Daddy had said. Dee had heard him over the buzz-hum in her ears and through the fuzzy red light in front of her closed eyes, and she knew that he'd meant it. She didn't think he knew she'd heard him, but that was okay, because he didn't know that she hated Mama either.  
She was glad she could be with Daddy all--or at least most--of the time now, instead of only on weekends. It was so much better to live with Daddy. Even when the Wagon was in the shop and he wouldn't take her out of the driveway on the motorcycle because of her arm and they had to ride in his old car (which smelled) . . . even then, it was better.  
Over in the driver's seat, Daddy was still muttering, but loud enough now so that they could hear him. "Not my fault Puar made me wreck the Wagon"--this at the shapeshifter's protest--"Also not my fault the mechanics have his brains"--this at Puar's further protest--"Furthermore not my fault we don't have a van . . . but I think I want one. Dee, you wouldn't mind a van, would you?"  
Dee blinked and considered this. "Can we get one with a TV?"  
"No. Yamucha'll be trying to watch it instead of the road and--"  
"Yes, we can," Daddy said, ignoring Puar's commentary.  
"Cool."  
"Very cool," Daddy agreed, starting to look excited.   
Dee craned her neck so she could look up and see Puar, who was on top of her seat. She wasn't surprised to see him rolling his eyes; he didn't disagree with Daddy about too much, but cars were one of the things he thought Daddy was stupid about.  
Then they pulled up to Capsule Corp. Because it was huge, and she'd only been there a couple times before, she had to stare, and all thoughts of Mama left her mind for the moment.

* * *  
After another, rather heated debate, Benaa and Raditz agreed on the color of the robe he didn't want to wear. More accurately, they compromised: Benaa didn't want him to wear black, because it seemed inappropriate; Raditz didn't want to wear any of the bright colors Benaa thought would fit him. They'd settled on forest green, a color neither one of them really disliked.  
Now, Raditz stood in his armor, robe in his arms, sending Benaa a look that had always made her want to run.   
"Care to join me?" he asked, and she closed her eyes tightly, willed herself not to turn around and flee to her damned King to weep in his arms.  
That would not be a good idea. Doing so would hurt the long-haired, deep-eyed man before her, a man she had seen grow from a boy. It would hurt a flame-haired monarch in the depths, the King she'd sworn heart, soul, and body to on the day she brought him to his knees in battle. It would hurt her, too, no matter what she did, because it always had . . .   
How often had Raditz extended such invitations in life, both when he knew of her betrothal and after she had decide she didn't mind the person she was betrothed to? Too often, surely, for her to feel so . . . trapped . . . this time. She'd tell him no, maybe she'd laugh--not mockingly, never mockingly--and all would be . . . well, not fine. He'd just slammed the door in her face . . . she'd thought she had better control over her facial expressions than that, dammit!  
She leaned against the wall opposite the door and tossed his halo upwards, catching it on its way down only to toss it up again and catch it . . . and as she did so, she fumed. Had her mind-shields not been fully raised, Purgatory would have shaken with the ferocity of her thoughts.  
Only he had ever been capable of flustering her so. She didn't understand it, not at all; she felt nothing for Raditz, not the way that she felt for her mate. Oh, she cared for him as much as one could care for a friend, but as a lover? No. Just . . . no. And, damn him, he'd never understood that, still didn't understand that . . .   
Once Raditz was finished, she was going to make him come to the shielded training room with her, at which point she was going to beat the Hell out of him. Probably literally.

* * *  
"You go and play while I talk to your dad, okay?" Mrs. Bulma said. It sounded a little bit like a request and a lot like an order.  
"But--" Daddy began, only to be cut off when Mrs. Bulma made a shushing noise.  
"She'll be fine," Mrs. Bulma said. "Carrot's party won't start for at least an hour, and we need to talk."  
Daddy looked like he was going to say but again, but instead he looked down at her and said, "Go play, Dee."  
Dee knew better than to disobey Daddy. He'd never hit her, not even before he'd found out that Mama did. Instead, when she did something bad and he learned about it, he would look at her with a disappointed expression on his face. And then he would have a long, sober talk with her about how there were reasons there were rules and she needed to follow them whether she knew those reasons or not. These talks always made Dee feel miserable and awfully ashamed of herself. She usually did her best to be good because Daddy's talks were worse than anything else.  
She left the living room and headed down a random hallway, not worrying about where she was going. Though Daddy had taken her here more than once, and she knew exactly how easy getting lost was, she also knew that there were cameras everywhere, so they could find her if she got too lost.  
Capsule Corp. had a lot of hallways. Dee wondered just how many there were and, also, how many rooms each one led to, as well as how many there were total. Thousands, at least, she figured. Thousands and thousands. Daddy said he doubted if there were more than a hundred, but Dee thought thousands sounded better.  
She'd been totally, completely, and blissfully lost for ten minutes when a cat rounded the next corner at a brisk trot. It saw her and ran up to her to rub itself around her ankles.  
"Hi, kitty," she greeted, reaching down to pet it. Just in time, she remembered her cast and that it might be a bad idea to pick it up. It was hard to pick up squirming animals like cats when she had a cast on her arm.  
When she straightened up from petting the cat, she discovered herself looking at a very irritated looking Carrot.  
Aware of some of Carrot's habits, Dee put her right hand on her hip and said, "You really shouldn't chase cats around like that. How'd you like it if someone chased you around?"  
"I'm not chasing her," the boy replied. He snorted as though Dee had said something awfully dense. "I'm stalking her. There's a difference. And I could stop most people from chasing me anyway. And I can't stalk her if you're distracting her."  
"Not my fault she came to be petted," Dee countered, reaching down to pet her again. "Maybe she wants to be petted by me more than she wants to be chased by you."  
Carrot snorted again. "I doubt it."  
"Then why is she letting me pet her?"  
"'Cause she's taking a break from being stalked, and when she's done, she'll keep going."  
"Bet she won't."  
"Bet she will."  
"Will not!"  
"Will too!"  
"Not!"  
"Too!"  
"Not!"  
"Too!"  
"Not!"  
"Not!"  
"We agree!"  
"No, we don't . . . that was a trick, you were supposed to fall for it . . ."  
Dee made a face that involved crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out. "I know; that's why I didn't."  
Carrot rolled his eyes, then reached down and picked the cat up. She meowed in protest, and he scowled at Dee like it was her fault. They stood there for a few seconds, him scowling and Dee trying to arrange her face into something a little bit meaner than crossed eyes and stuck-out tongue, and then he noticed something.  
"Hey, what happened to your arm?" he asked, his scowl fading. He dropped the cat in order to give her cast his full attention.  
"It got broken, obviously," Dee said as snidely as she could, not wanting him of all people to know what had happened. It was bad enough to know that Daddy and Mrs. Bulma were probably talking about it right now; it'd be a lot worse for Carrot to find out. She didn't like him enough for him to know anything like that about her. In fact, she didn't like him much at all. "Duh."  
"Well, yeah . . ." Carrot said. "I mean, what happened to it?"  
"It's none of your business," Dee replied, settling for the one thing she could think of to say that wasn't a lie.  
"Why not?" he asked  
"Because it's my business, and I get to decide who else needs to know."  
This wasn't strictly true; it was Daddy's business, too, and she hadn't had say in whether he told Mrs. Bulma about it or not. But that was okay, because Dee didn't mind Mrs. Bulma knowing. It seemed to Dee, now that she lived with him and could observe better, that Daddy called the blue-haired woman every day, although he didn't visit her all that much.  
Dee had seen old pictures of Daddy and Mrs. Bulma from before Dee had been born and even before Mrs. Bulma had been a Mrs. She thought that maybe, just maybe, a very long time ago, Daddy and Mrs. Bulma had been more than just friends. Also, she thought that they might have actually been boyfriend and girlfriend. What was more, she thought that Daddy sometimes wished they'd never become just friends.  
But these were all just thoughts; she'd never asked Daddy about any of them, so she didn't know for sure if they were right or not.  
"I think you're not telling me something," Carrot announced, straightening up and scowling again.  
Dee blinked. "Um . . . I just said that . . .?"  
Carrot turned pink. "I know! It's just that I think you're not telling me something that you should or maybe there's a not a good reason why you're not telling me or maybe you have a good reason but you have it for the wrong reasons or maybe--I just have a feeling," he finished lamely.  
"Well, your feeling's wrong," Dee said, firmly. She had no idea what he was trying to say, but she didn't want to have to take the time to figure it out.  
"No it's not."  
"Yes it is."  
"Is not!"  
"Is too!"  
"Not!"  
"Too!"  
"N--"  
::I do realize that you are both children, but you are acting childish. Be quiet.::  
It took Dee a moment to halfway realize what had just happened. Someone had said that, but she hadn't heard it with her ears. Instead, she'd heard it inside of her head, like the echo that usually followed people's words, only without the words themselves coming first.  
"Thought you were going to explain something or other to Tousan or ask him something or something like that?" Carrot asked, looking past Dee at something behind her.  
::I decided it might be wise to delay doing so until a better opportunity presents itself. I do not see why I should approach him when it might be far better for him to--::  
Carrot, who had almost looked like he was thinking for the past few seconds, interrupted with, "You got cold feet?"  
::Erm. You could say that, yes . . .::  
At this, Carrot snickered.  
Dee turned around to see just what he was looking at. He was talking back to the voice in her head (in his head too, since he was talking to it), and most people looked at who they were talking to if they had that teasing tone in their voice.  
She could not believe what she saw.  
Almost a yard away on the floor of the well-lit hallway, there sat a perfect little curly-furred Cocker Spaniel puppy. It had wings growing from its shoulder blades, which were shaped like a hawk's wings but darker in color than the feathers of any hawk.  
"I'll bet you Dee is thinking 'it' and 'puppy,'" Carrot said cheerfully.  
::Everyone does,:: the voice answered. ::She is not likely to be different, but I can not check; now that I have Chosen you, it would not be ethical for me to look at private thoughts other than your own. Then again, it never was possible for me to look at human thoughts, so I could not regardless.::  
"Why?"  
::Because Happits do not form links with humans. Saiyajin alone can we alliance ourselves with in such a manner.::  
"Oh. Okay."  
Dee stepped to the side, turned around so that all she had to do was move her eyes to see either Carrot or the weird puppy, and closed her eyes. This sort of disagreed with the purpose of turning around in the first place, but she didn't care. "What's going on here?" she yelled. It was a decent yell, too, plenty loud and demanding enough.  
Carrot and the puppy, Lady the Happit, told her what was going on here.

* * *  
Jay stood out in the hallway, watching Pan and the juveniles through the six-inch thick glass. So far, Pan had mostly managed to get them out of their frightened-but-holding-their-ground-anyway stances.  
Pity they'd had to move them indoors, but Mister Rex was subject to sunburn after trampling his shade. So they'd moved him--again--but not back to Missus Rex's enclosure. Rather, they'd put him in the juveniles' pen, after having moved the juveniles to one of the empty nurseries. All three of them were male; neither Jay nor Pan intended to lose one or more of them just so they wouldn't have to mix up another batch of that repulsive dinosaur sunscreen. Moving them inside had seemed their only real option.  
Little Tyran was the most depressed seeming of the three at moment; he wouldn't even sniff at anything Pan offered him. Odd behavior for him, that. Little usually ate more than his brothers, with an appetite so voracious that he usually tried to eat Pan's arm along with his big, bloody pieces of meat.  
Littler and Littlest Tyran seemed to be adjusting better than their brother; they'd already eaten their normal share of the meal as well as half of Little's.  
As a matter of fact . . .   
"Don't let Littler or Littlest have too much more," Jay advised, speaking into the microphone on her headpiece.  
The Tyrannosaurs--or the juveniles, at any rate--were a great deal like fish. Feed a fish too much or too little, and it died; feed a young Rex too much or too little, it became sick and maybe died. They'd lost the Tyran's sister, Big Tyra, that way.  
"I know, I know," Pan snapped, stepping out of Littler's path. He felt playful currently, evident from the way he kept charging the raven-haired girl with apparent attempt to butt her into the wall with his head.  
"Just checkin'," Jay said, not bothering to feel wounded. As long as Pan didn't take it out on the dinosaurs, all was well, in Jay's opinion. Oddly enough, though Pan was the only person Jay'd ever met who could possibly hurt a Tyrannosaur with her bare hands, she wouldn't even swat at Mister Rex in self-defense. Far less would she bully the Tyrans because she was pissed at her errant husband.  
"Well, don't check."  
"Yes, ma'am." Jay saluted the back of Pan's head and mused on the ironies of life, the universe, and supervisor-type people who saluted the only person working under them. As she was musing, an unexpected thought popped into her head. "Pan . . . do you know anyone who could replace you until the baby comes? Seeing as I did not receive a two-week's notice, your coming up with someone would be the best blessing since Missus Rex's eggs."  
Inside the room, Pan dodged Littlest, who'd decided to follow his brother's example. She alighted from the floor; as she floated up, she turned around, grinning. After a moment, during which Jay crossly wondered what could possibly be so funny, she began to laugh.  
Jay tapped her foot and crossed her arms, waited for Pan to stop laughing.  
And Pan did stop laughing, five minutes later. She wiped her eyes, then said, in a voice that suggested she might just start laughing again, "You'd want someone who can fly?"  
"Uh-huh," Jay said.  
"Who likes dinosaurs?"  
"Yep."  
"Who couldn't get eaten by a dinosaur if he walked into Mister Rex's mouth, just because Rex wouldn't want to eat him?"  
"Hai. That'd work." Jay tried not to sound as enthusiastic as she felt; surely there must be a catch.  
Pan wiped her eyes again and snickered. She started guffawing again when Littler and Littlest, who apparently didn't want to jump up to get her, slammed into each other then hastily backed away, both twitching their little arms like they wanted to rub their heads. "Try my Uncle Goten," she said finally. "I'd say Dad, or even Ojiisan, but neither of them likes or gets along with the Rexes."  
"Why not?" Jay asked, wondering how anyone with testosterone couldn't like dinosaurs, especially the ones with big teeth.  
"Well," Pan said after a bit of a pause, "they've got a habit of getting almost-eaten by them . . ."  
Jay considered. "Good reason."  
"Uh-huh."  
"So your uncle might--"  
"Will. He needs a job."  
"You're sure?"  
"You have no concept of how badly he needs a job. He doesn't think he can make a career out of anything fun, but I don't think he's ever considered working with dinosaurs."  
"So, you're sure?"  
"Who's sure?"  
"Pan . . ."  
"Fairly sure. I'll call him tonight and he can start . . . is tomorrow or the day after okay?"  
"Either works . . . Pan, you're a dear." Jay paused, then said, "Now, are we going to get Little to eat anything today?"  
"If he doesn't want me to stuff it down his gullet, he'll eat."  
"Oh my. Won't you make the impressive mother? 'Eat your peas, Junior, or I'll stuff them down your gullet.'"  
Pan sniggered.

* * *  
Raditz was almost surprised at how quickly the stench and feel of Hell left him once assaulted by the heat and force from Purgatory's shower-head.  
Almost surprised, but not quite.  
He could be dense at times, but he had been paying attention to Benaa's speeches-of-explanation, and he had caught "things are more subjective here." Therefore, it stood to reason (he could reason, although he doubted Benaa would believe it were anyone to suggest the possibility; she'd never professed to believe that he could be anything other than dense) that if he told himself Hell's filth would come off, it would. And it did. It came off him as though he were shedding his skin and turned the water black on its way around and into the drain--and Raditz felt cleaner than he could remember ever having felt.  
Perhaps this extraordinary clean feeling was the result of being so dirty for so long, like how joy was difficult to perceive until one had experienced sorrow.  
Unfortunately, once he examined himself more closely, he noticed that this clean feeling didn't feel as though it had gone far beneath the skin at all. All that seemed to have gone were the effects of Hell--all the effects of Hell, from the missing luster in his hair to the hollowness in his chest. Granted, the emptiness caused by the lack of a heartbeat was still there, but the other emptiness, that nearly utter lack of real emotion, had gone.  
It was admittedly wonderful not to feel like he'd been in Hell or even forgetting what it had really been like there, but Raditz did not like the other effect of the cleansing. Suddenly, he could remember the events of the day he'd died with a clarity he had not experienced since before the Saiyajin had been set aside to an obscure Hell to sit there for Eternity, forgotten.  
Ah, well. He'd known since he was little that he couldn't have everything. Even if he could, he'd still have things to complain about, seeing as "everything" did not mean "everything good, nothing bad."  
Showering took him as long as five minutes. Drying his hair took as little as two hours, and that only to keep it from dripping. Then it had to air-dry for two days, at which point it was almost done being damp and someone was usually pestering him to take another one. At least, that was the way it had worked before Furiiza, when Raditz had lived in the Palace as a trainer-guard-nursemaid for the Prince, and before that when he'd lived in his mother's house. Okaasan had always made him take showers, and Benaa had picked it up from her so that he couldn't even get away from it once he'd left home.  
However . . . things were more subjective here. He would have to remember to keep a positive attitude.  
He scowled. What cynic could keep one of those going for more than ten minutes? Not him.  
Even so, when he stepped out of the shower, he had no need for a towel. The robe Benaa wanted him to wear hung from a hook on the door; he glared at it, then slipped it off the hook. After a minute of study with his callous hands and sharp eyes, he slipped it on.  
Its softness was something he'd forgotten and simply feeling it with his hands was quite different from wearing it. He'd forgotten how comfortable a robe was, in comparison with the itching tightness of plated armor. Closing his eyes, he stood there for a time, doing nothing and thinking nothing but about how it felt against his skin.  
Light, as well as soft. Incredibly light. Somehow, he had not remembered how little fabric weighed.  
His tail found the appropriate hole while he stood there and furled around his waist. It did occur to him to put on the under-shorts that went with the robe, and his tail had to unwrap from around his waist so that it could go through that hole as well. Afterwards, he studied himself in the mirror; for the first time since Vejiitasei, Raditz approved of his own appearance. Granted, this was the first time he'd had a chance to think about it since then, but . . .   
Okaasan had been right in saying he'd filled out. The Saiyajin staring at him in the mirror was not the lanky, bush-haired fellow Raditz remembered. Instead, the person in the mirror was big and solid, and his hair, although wild, no longer looked out-of-place. The person in the mirror also looked dumfounded at the changes; Raditz rid himself of that expression at once. He hated looking like a small child who'd just realized something amazing about himself that the rest of the world had known forever.  
He didn't like the frown he found himself wearing and relaxed his features until the figure in the mirror gazed at him with a strange, aged seriousness. For longer than he might have, Raditz studied that expression, and he wondered where it had come from and why.  
Then he frowned at himself again and, before he could be distracted by something else, opened the door and walked back out into the hallway.  
And ran directly into his okaasan.  
Who stepped back, glared, and opened her mouth as if to scold him--  
To close it and blink, her glare softening into a not-quite-displeased thoughtful expression. Raditz recognized it as how she had always looked in life when presented with a problem she did not at first understand.  
My own mother does not recognize me . . . remember this, Raditz thought. He raised an eyebrow at her and crossed his arms, to panic slightly and lower eyebrow and arms when she started glaring again.  
"You were in Hell an hour ago," she informed him. "Why aren't you there anymore, how did you get here, and how is it so difficult to look where you're going before you try to get there?"  
Raditz remembered his mother's game; he smirked and crossed his arms again. "I didn't get caught, a Gate, and if I always looked I'd always be late."  
Kak'ri snorted. "I fail to see what that has to do with it, you'd have been wiser to think of that about thirty years ago, and you're never on time anyway."  
"If I'd gotten caught, I wouldn't be here, I've never been wise, and--how long?!"  
Generally, Raditz would not have dared to end the game so soon, because whenever he did, Okaasan acted grumpy for at least an hour afterwards. But in this case--  
"Thirty years?"  
\--he could not help making an exception.  
"Actually, it'd be closer to forty," Benaa offered from the side before Kak'ri could speak.  
"Forty?" Raditz croaked.  
"As an estimate, that's good. I wouldn't try to be too specific; it's hard to be sure of exact dates, here," Kak'ri said, not sounding in the least bit grumpy.  
If Raditz hadn't known better--and he knew better than not to know better--he'd have thought that Okaasan had mellowed since her death. But he had a good short-term memory, and he remembered her posture and face expressions when she'd come to see him in Hell; the stiff swiping of her tail back and forth had been enough to show her full vexation. Okaasan had always been adept at holding grudges, especially against family members. If a relative did something she didn't like, that relative would be either ignored forever or severely chastised. At least, that was what had always happened in life, and Raditz had not seen evidence of any significant change in Kak'ri's temperament.  
And he still hadn't come up with a reason for his actions on Chikyuu--not that he'd been trying at all, but it would be nice to have some manner of excuse ready. He expected Okaasan would get on him about it within the next minute or so, if not As Soon As Feasible.  
"As I said, you're never on time anyway," Okaasan said, and she smirked as though she found something amusing.  
Raditz could see nothing amusing about this, though he might have had he not been the one she spoke to.  
Then Okaasan put her hands on her hips, glared, and said, "Now that you're here and smell better, there's nothing to drive me away. Therefore, you may now explain why you acted in such a way when you went to find your brother on Chikyuu. You will not get away with 'I was having a bad day.'"  
Yes, but . . . he had been having a bad day. He'd died . . . definitely a bad day.  
He knew not to voice this to Okaasan, for she'd never liked "smart ass" answers and it hurt when she cuffed him, even though his hair softened blows from most others.  
"Well?"  
"Uh . . ."  
"'Uh' isn't an answer either," Benaa pointed out.  
"Be quiet, Benaa."  
"Yes ma'am."  
Raditz scowled in Benaa's direction. This was none of her business. Of course, she had always considered it her business to either comment on his troubles or get him out of them, so it didn't matter to her whether it was her business or wasn't.  
"Well?" Kak'ri repeated.  
Raditz closed his eyes and thought about it. And as he thought about it, he delved into memories he had not even once looked at too closely, he found the reason.  
He had been having a bad day . . . but that bad day had been the product of twenty-some bad years, and the little brother he'd come to retrieve had not been very little at all.  
That brother had lost his tail.  
That brother had not been the least bit cooperative.  
That brother had not remembered anything, not even the damned song, when the entire point of singing it in the first place was so that he would remember the singer. Raditz hadn't had to sing to him, but Bardock hadn't been going to, and Okaasan had been gone; otherwise, Kakarotto wouldn't have had a single member of his family to remember, but he hadn't remembered anyway, damn him!  
That brother had been a stupid little shit, and Raditz had taken things a bit far, his temper winning over sense for the last time. Before he'd been able to really think about what he was doing, he'd been dying, and so had the little shit, and the little shit's kid had been out, and . . .   
He hadn't wanted to kill Kakarotto. Or maybe he had, only he hadn't seen Kakarotto as blood, as family, but as a token of every little damned thing that had made Raditz's life Hell since Vejiitasei. . . .   
And he had died, and really had been in Hell, and it had been a thousand times worse than life, for there had been no good moments to counter the bad, and . . .  
Well, now he was here, and he was trying to explain it to Okaasan, only no words would come--which was good because he didn't know how to convey all of this to her so that she would understand, and--  
And he was half-Esper yet hadn't even considered trying to think all this at her.  
He did so now, squeezed his eyes even more tightly together and willed every bit of that feeling--that betrayal--at Kak'ri. She had to understand, had to, because who did he have here, besides Okaasan and Benaa? Who had he ever had, but them? Who was he likely to have, but them?  
When he opened his eyes, Kak'ri had donned her not-quite-displeased, faraway thoughtful frown again.  
The first thing she said was neither sympathetic nor damning. "How are you supposed to learn to talk if you think everything at me?" she scolded, but softly.  
"I can so talk," Raditz said; his tail halted in mid-swing and quivered. Somehow this was important, and what he said at this moment would tell Okaasan whatever her expression insisted she was trying to figure out. "I'm talking right now . . ."  
"Pfft," she said with a snort. "That's a detail." She crossed her arms, mock-scowled at him, and Raditz wondered if he would ever understand her moods. It occurred to him to see what her tail was doing, as tails were the best indicator of Saiyajin emotion, but she'd wrapped it around her waist. "All the time, when you were little, you used to think everything--and I didn't have the strength to ignore your thoughts so you would talk," she mused, and Raditz knew what was coming next because this had always been Okaasan's favorite gripe. "Bardock could, but he was off-planet most of the time, the stupid goddamn useless male."  
"I told you: you ought to go visit him," Benaa interrupted. "And I've been telling you so since he died."  
"No, you haven't," Kak'ri replied, shaking her head as if to rid herself of some memory. "Not that long. It hasn't been more than fifteen years since Enma-sama ordered the move to a back Hell, and before that no one we knew was in a Hell that could be visited." She shook her head again, and the rest of her somewhat glazed expression left her eyes. "Not forgotten," she said to him. "Understood, but not forgotten."  
With that, she turned around and began to walk away.  
Acting on some instinct from long ago, Raditz's tail snapped forward and wrapped around her wrist. "Okaasan . . ." he said.  
Kak'ri turned halfway back around. When she saw that he had nothing to say, she patted his tail twice, then said, "As no lasting harm was done except to you, then it's forgiven as well. You can let go of my wrist; I have administrations to bother."  
Raditz released her and watched her go until she rounded a corner. Then he turned to Benaa, who glared at him so violently that her entire face twisted up.  
She threw his halo at his face; he caught it and held onto it as he tried to think of what he might have done to get this reaction.  
Oh.  
He had invited her into the shower, hadn't he? Well, that didn't mean he'd meant it--oh, wait: yes it did. Even in jest, he always meant it, because what if she said yes the one time he didn't want her? That would be a very bad irony . . .  
Unfortunately, Benaa did not share his views.  
"You," she said, pointing at him as though he couldn't grasp who 'you' was, "are a complete and utter ass, and I don't want to have to deal with you right now. What I want to do is finish the book I'm on--and I'm going to do so, after which I will do what I told you I will do, which is to find some way to get you back to life. Until I do that, you will stay away from me, because, as I have already said, I do not want to have to deal with you."  
As she walked down the hall away from him, Raditz wondered several things. First: why hadn't she aimed some manner of blow at him before leaving? Second: had he really done anything bad enough in the last hour to be left standing in the hallway all alone by the two people he'd been closest to in his entire life?  
Then, he decided something that every male of every species has decided at one point or another: he would never understand females. Ever.

* * *  
In quite another place, not within the Afterlife nor where mortals dwelled, two shapes walked to a dark pool. This pool had, in centuries past, been formed of something that was not water nor any true draught. Rather, a dark magic, ancient and debased, filled it.  
These shapes, upon study under light, almost seemed to bear characteristics of several of Chikyuu's species: feline and avian, cat and bird. Unbeknownst to Cron, they were the last. For in the millennium since they had strayed, their companions had slowly faded or slept away, leaving not even the husks of their bodies behind. Long ago, The Nameless had been stripped of their right to solid form; longer ago still they had thrown away that right.  
The shape who had been male in that long ago time studied the other, who had been female. After a time, which might have been a minute and might have been a year--difficult to discern the passage of Time without a body to age--he thought that he knew her. He dared not speak what had been her name, for he knew the consequence of that. Instead, he continued to study her, until he thought that she recognized him as well.  
I am sorry, he said.  
You are, she answered harshly. That is not a very good condolence.  
He considered attempting to explain that with more words, but did not and remained silent.  
It had certainly better not be an apology, for we share equal blame in this, she said when he said nothing. The gone ones, each of them, have taken their blame with them, and therefore it was more their fault than ours.  
That is not a very good consolation, he said.  
And in the dark they sat by their pool, wondering when their Master would wake, dreading the moment he would rise.


End file.
